Ebook: The Primary Care Toolkit: Practical Resources for the Integrated Behavioral Care Provider

The Primary Care Toolkit

Practical Resources for the Integrated Behavioral Care Provider

Edited by Larry James, Tripler Army Medical Center, Honolulu

and William O’Donohue, University of Nevada, Reno

I’m working in a primary care facility.

Now…what am I doing here?

Ideally, the integration of behavioral health into the medical setting brings effective, coordinated treatment and increased satisfaction for both practitioner and patient. In reality, however, the results can be far from perfect—and far from integrated. The Primary Care Toolkit introduces mental health professionals to the best possibilities for the collaboration while preparing them for the crucial differences between primary care and traditional mental health settings, to make the transition as worthwhile and non-traumatic as possible.

The editors, experts on collaborative care (and astute judges of its potentials and pitfalls), have packed the Toolkit with hands-on, evidence-based, practical information, including handouts, protocols, inventories, and reference lists. Readers will improve their medical literacy, learn how to make more effective use of the clinic’s patient education and marketing resources, and uncover key consultation skills. And chapters for primary care physicians and administrators help all parties understand the synergy underlying integrative care.

A sampling of the Toolkit’s features:

• Assessment and treatment guidelines for core illnesses (chronic pain, heart disease, anxiety, depression), and issues (treatment compliance, obesity, smoking, somatization) encountered in primary care.
• Hiring and interview protocols for administrators.
• Training programs and issues.
• Financial and billing models.
• Quality management/improvement tools.
• Review of the current CPT codes.

The Primary Care Toolkit is a safety net for the clinician adjusting to collaborative practice, giving new "team players"—clinical and health psychologists, psychiatrists, mental health nurses, and clinical social workers, as well as the professionals working with them—greater confidence and competence.

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Integrated care is receiving a lot of attention from clinicians, administrators, policy makers, and researchers. Given the current healthcare crises in the United States, where costs, quality, and access to care are of particular concern, many are looking for new and better ways of delivering behavioral health services. Integrating behavioral health into primary care medical settings has been shown to: (1) produce healthier patients; (2) produce medical savings; (3) produce higher patient satisfaction; (4) leverage the primary care physician’s time so that they can be more productive; and (5) increase physician satisfaction. For these reasons this is an emerging paradigm with a lot of interest and momentum. For example, the President’s New Freedom Commission on Mental Health has recently endorsed redesigning the mental health system so that much of this is integrated into primary care medicine.