Bipolar-I Depression Outpatient Treatment Quality and Costs in Usual Care Practice

Considerable resources were spent in care inconsistent with guidelines- much of that was care that could worsen the course of bipolar illness. This provides an opportunity for policy makers to develop mechanisms of quality improvement that redirect a substantial proportion of resource dollars to care that is more efficacious. Further, when conducting quality assessment and examining outcomes using administrative data, hospital admissions alone are an inadequate measure of bipolar disorder affective instability in claims data.