We now have over twenty years of experience with research and practice with integrated behavioral healthcare.
There are now over seventy research studies that have been done in this
area and if you look at the key message that comes from this body of research it's really three things.
If you have primary care providers, primary care physicians,
and mental health professionals collaborate closely, work closely together caring for a patient,
there are three things that come from that.
First of all you get a much better patient care experience,
second of all you have better outcomes,
and that's not just physical health outcomes but also mental health
outcomes and better functioning in general.
And then uh, you also have lower healthcare costs.
When you provide this kind of care in an integrated way it actually
leads to a reduction in overall healthcare costs and today that is called the triple aim,
better patient care experience, better health outcomes and lower healthcare costs.
Well if there is one thing that we have learned from research on
integrated care that's also tremendously important for every practitioner,
every practice is trying to implement an effective evidence based integrated care program,
that is the idea of keeping your eye on the prize.
That's also something we now call measurement based practice.
So the idea there is that just like with high blood pressure where every
time that you come into the doctor's office somebody will measure your
blood pressure and see if your treatment is on the right track,
we have to do the exact same thing when we're treating things like depression or anxiety.
Now that's easier said than done but it's actually quite easy to do,
it can take a simple nine item rating scale that the patient fills
out to see how bad their depression is doing or how much they are
progressing in their treatment and that can be done in a couple minutes
in the doctor's office or it can be done at home before coming in to see the doctor.
And with that information we then can see is the treatment working?
And what we'll discover is about half the time the treatment is
actually quite effective and at about half the time it's not quite
working yet and that doesn't mean we have a bad patient or a bad provider,
it's just not quite the right treatment.
And that means we're going to have make a change in treatment,
we might have to get a consultation with another specialist but it really is important
to have that information every time we see the patient, to see are we on the right track,
can we make changes so ultimately we can really get the vast majority of
our patients in a primary care setting better.