This Collaborative began in February 2015 and ended in January 2016.
To see upcoming programs related to this topic, please visit our Education page.
As the United States moves to value-based care, larger hospitals and health systems are increasingly acquiring and/or aligning with primary care providers (PCPs) to manage patients and serve as the link to all other health care. In addition to high-quality care for physical illnesses, optimal primary care should include screening and treatment of behavioral health disorders, support for patients in engaging in healthy behavior change, such as smoking cessation, and effective self-management support to improve chronic disease outcomes. While many are aware of the importance of this work, organizations have struggled with how to optimize their care teams to integrate behavioral health care due to a variety of factors, such as a lack of sustainable funding models, infrastructural issues, and difficulty operationalizing behavioral health principles into a redesigned care system.
Building integrated and effective primary care teams is key to meeting the challenges that PCPs are expected to address, including:
- providing acute, chronic, and preventative care while building meaningful relationships;
- managing patients with multiple diagnoses, including mental health and behavioral problems;
- increasing access for newly insured patients;
- coordinating care; and
- meeting targets on countless metrics for both cost and quality.
In order to effectively treat the whole person, primary care must build high-functioning practice teams and seamlessly integrate behavioral health capacity into the team. To help organizations do this, the Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI), in partnership with the MacColl Center for Health Care Innovation, invites you to join Optimize Primary Care Teams to Meet Patients' Medical AND Behavioral Needs, a 12-month Collaborative designed to create the next generation of high performing primary care teams to address patients' medical and behavioral health conditions and treat the whole person.
This initiative will be based on IHI’s work on behavioral health integration as well as evidence and insights assembled by the MacColl Center through careful study of exemplary primary care practices across the US through a national program of The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation: Primary Care Teams: Learning from Effective Ambulatory Practices (PCT-LEAP). Participants will then deploy these optimized care teams to provide high-quality medical and behavioral health care to their patients.
