Cost and Cost-effectiveness of Hospital vs Residential Crisis Care for Patients Who Have Serious Mental Illness
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: This study evaluates the cost and cost-effectiveness of a residential crisis program compared with treatment received in a general hospital psychiatric unit for patients who have serious mental illness in need of hospital-level care and who are willing to accept voluntary treatment. METHODS: Patients in the Montgomery County, Maryland, public mental health system (N = 119) willing to accept voluntary acute care were randomized to the psychiatric ward of a general hospital or a residential crisis program. Unit costs and service utilization data were used to estimate episode and 6-month treatment costs from the perspective of government payors. Episodic symptom reduction and days residing in the community over the 6 months after the episode were chosen to represent effectiveness. RESULTS: Mean (SD) acute treatment episode costs was $3046 ($2124) in the residential crisis program, 44% lower than the $5549 ($3668) episode cost for the general hospital. Total 6-month treatment costs for patients assigned to the 2 programs were $19,941 ($19,282) and $25,737 ($21,835), respectively. Treatment groups did not differ significantly in symptom improvement or community days achieved. Incremental cost-effectiveness ratios indicate that in most cases, the residential crisis program provides near-equivalent effectiveness for significantly less cost. CONCLUSIONS: Residential crisis programs may be a cost-effective approach to providing acute care to patients who have serious mental illness and who are willing to accept voluntary treatment. Where resources are scarce, access to needed acute care might be extended using a mix of hospital, community-based residential crisis, and community support services.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".