Collaborative Care Resources
The Economics of Behavioral Health Services in Medical Settings: A Summary of the Evidence. A paper prepared as part of the Health Care for the Whole Person Initiative for the American Psychological Association, by Alexander Blount, EdD, Michael Schoenbaum, PhD, Roger Kathol, MD, Bruce L. Rollman, MD, Marshall Thomas, MD, William O’Donohue, PhD & C. J. Peek, PhD. (a later version was published in the Spring 2007 edition of Professional Psychology Research and Practice.
Integrated Primary Care: Organizing the Evidence. A paper by Sandy Blount, EdD, on the evidence supporting integrating behavioral health into primary care services, first published in Families, Systems & Health in 2003.
Here is a very good basic powerpoint presentation on integrating mental health/substance abuse treatment into primary care, from the Robert Graham Center. The presentation, Integrating primary care and mental health/substance use, was done by Bob Phillips, MD, MSPH, director of the Graham Center, and Mary Jane England, MD, president of Regis College.
Integrated Primary Care combines medical and behavioral health services to more fully address the spectrum of that patients bring to primary medical care.
Because the vast majority of patients in primary care have either a physical ailment that is affected by stress, problems maintaining healthy lifestyles or a psychological disorder, it is clinically effective and cost effective to make behavioral health providers part of primary medical care.
IPC allows patients to feel that for any problem they bring, they have come to the right place. By teaming mental health and medical providers, IPC is the structural realization of the biopsychosocial model advocated so broadly in Family Medicine and Psychiatry.
It is the reunification in practice of the mind and the body, for so long addressed in the separate worlds of medical and mental health treatment.