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2014 Disparity Data on Purchased Services Report

California law and regulation requires that regional centers display on their Web sites information about the dollar value of services they purchase for clients. These data (called "purchase of service" or "POS" data) must be reported separately by clients' ethnic/racial group, langauge and diagnosis. The Legislature asked for this kind of reporting as a first step in trying to understand whether and what types of disparities exist in purchased services across these groups - in other words whether clients in some ethnic, language or diagnostic groups receive, on average, more services than clients in other groups. This year, the reports have been expanded to show differences by living arrangement and also to include the costs paid by regional centers for insurance copays and deductibles, and co-insurance.

Documents show expenditures and authorized services by ethnicity or race, by the primary language of the client/family, by residence type, and by diagnosis. You will find both amounts authorized and amounts actually spent by the regional center. The last column of these reports gives the percent of authorized services that were actually used. For a variety of reasons, some clients/families do not use all of the services that are authorized. Reports are also included for clients who received no purchased services. An explanatory document, prepared by the Association of Regional Center Agencies, is also included. This highlights the limitations of the data.