Effectiveness Research on the Cost of Family Therapy - Psychotherapeutenjopurnal.

Abstract

This paper provides a summary of effectiveness research on the costs of including family therapy in mental health services. Data was available from three different sources: 1) a large western Health Maintenance Organization with 180,000 subscribers in the local Utah region; 2) the Medicaid system of the entire State of Kansas in the United States; and 3) a US health insurance company (Cigna Behavioral Health) with several million subscribers. Results suggest that family therapy may reduce the number of health care visits, especially for high utilizers. Also, studies of two different health care systems suggest that including family therapy as a treatment does not increase health care costs.