Integrated Care

Integrated Care: A Guide for Effective Implementation provides a detailed, thoughtful, and experience-based guide to the complex and potentially overwhelming process of implementing an integrated care program. The advantages of integrated care from both the clinical and administrative perspectives are many, including better detection of illness, improvement in overall health outcomes, a better patient care experience, flexibility in responding to policy and financial changes, and an emphasis on return on investment. The book addresses the emerging framework of core principles for effective integrated care, reviews the most up-to-date research on implementation, and presents practice-based experience to serve as a guide. This information is useful in both traditional integration of behavioral health into general medical settings (often primary care) or integrating general medical care into a specialty mental health or substance use treatment setting. Because administrators, clinicians, policy makers, payers and others need guidance in determining what effective implementation looks like, the authors offer a three-part examination of the key components of an implementation strategy and explore the elements essential for success.

The book is grounded in the authors' real-world expertise and offers readers practical, accessible information and support: Often efforts to implement an integrated care program fail because the model is more than just "plug and play." To address this misconception, the authors explore the successful implementation from every angle -- from leadership, primary care, therapist, psychiatric provider, and policy perspectives. As procedural and institutional hurdles are being overcome, codes for integrated care have been adopted. Accordingly, the book provides in-depth coverage of finance and funding models, challenges to billing, and emerging payment models. Each of the chapter authors were selected for their direct clinical experience in various integrated environments, their leadership in ushering teams through these initiatives, and/or their deep knowledge of payment and policy barriers.

Impediments to the widespread implementation of evidence-based programs include payment and regulatory barriers, lack of a workforce trained in effective collaboration, and cultural differences between the worlds of primary care and behavioral health care. Integrated Care: A Guide for Effective Implementation helps health care leaders and providers overcome these obstacles to implement a successful, patient-centered integrated care program.

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