Planning within multi-agency context.

Current environmental conditions such as limited financial resources, cost containment, rising consumer expectation, and perhaps more stringent regulation of available public monies to support social services signal declining opportunities for survival of autonomous, freestanding community agencies and the development of newer collaborative forms of organization. In order to preserve maximum input of need information among their professional and community environments, community agencies will require improved procedures for processing multisource assessments. A methodology is presented for weighting and pooling of multisource need information geared for use by planners and decisionmakers of performance oriented multi-agency health care systems.