A successful integrated health care model has at least three members of the team at its core.
This would be a primary care clinician,
a behavioral health clinician, and a care manager or a care coordinator.
Those three work together in order to address the various elements of a personal care plan and integrate those.
So they have to communicate well, they have to know each other's
strengths and style, and they have to make decisions sometimes on the
fly about who's going to take the lead on the problem right now.
A primary care practice that works properly addresses all of a patient's health care needs.
In order to do that, a small team of clinicians working together must be
on the job addressing all of these problems and all aspects of these problems for each patient.
The web portal that The Academy is producing is likely to be useful in at least two ways.
Number one, there's a lexicon which has been developed in the process of
this work and will be available there that helps people use common
language when they're describing integration, collaboration, coordination, and so forth.
So that we're talking about the same thing when we use the same words.
Second, it's a community.
People who are looking for answers to questions or problems that
they've got as they try to integrate can find others who might have solved those problems.
And so I think we'll see the portal becoming a very active learning
community for people trying to do integrated care.