Reevaluating the work of a community mental health center: the care of chronic patients.

Traditional forms of data-gathering have tended to underrepresent the care that community mental health centers provide to the more chronic, or seriously ill, patients. Using an alternative data-gathering method based on accumulated direct patient contacts, the authors illustrate how traditional data sets based on discharged patients and active patients yield very different views of the types of patients served and intensity of services received. Only by examining resource utilization among patients in both data sets were the authors able to show their center's extensive commitment to more chronic patients.