Measuring Children's Systems of Care using Anonymous Data Sets: Caseload Overlap, Service System Integration, and Number of Programs per Person

A first, basic question regarding the complexity of systems of care addresses the degrees to which individuals who are served by one program or service sector are also served by another program or service sector during the same time period. Program managers need to know whether and to what degree the young people on their caseload are also on the caseload of another specified program. The need for service coordination between community mental health and juvenile justice programs in the same geographical region, for instance, is indicated by the number of young people on both programs. This information also provides higher level system managers with an indication of the degree to which the community mental health program is serving this group of young people who have an elevated need for mental health services. Where there are integrated information systems or where individual information systems share unique person identifiers, caseload integration can be directly measured. In the absence of the ability to share unique person identifiers, information about caseload overlap may be derived using the statistical technology of Probabilistic Population Estimation (PPE).