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.

The goals of Integrated Care: Working at the Interface of Primary Care and Behavioral Health are to educate psychiatrists about the fundamental shift underway in health care and to prepare them to be successful and effective in the new health care arena. The passage and implementation of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act presents an opportunity for newly insured patients and for funding models of integrated care, enabling psychiatrists to have a more significant population-level impact. The only book of its kind, the guide defines integrated care, reviews the evidence base, and addresses the three potential benefits of this model of care: improved outcomes, cost containment, and enhanced patient experience (also known as the "triple aim"). The new models of integrated care presented in this book are population-based, which is the key to improved outcomes, and they represent a change in how medicine in general and psychiatry in particular will approach health care delivery moving forward.

The book's features are both high-impact and user-friendly: - The book is divided into two sections, "Behavioral Health in Primary Care Settings" and "Primary Care in Behavioral Health Care Settings," with Section 1 focused on improving the detection and treatment of behavioral health conditions by integrating behavioral health services into primary care settings and Section 2 focused on improving the health status of patient populations with serious mental illness by integrating primary care into behavioral health treatment.- Each chapter presents a set of "core principles of effective collaborative care," which serve as a guide for the structure and provision of care for the varying models, regardless of the setting.- Contributors provide dozens of examples that highlight the impact psychiatrists can make in achieving the triple aim of improved outcomes, cost containment, and enhanced experience.- Detailed case vignettes integrated throughout the book bring concepts to life and help clinicians to understand and improve the patient-provider relationship.

The information presented in these chapters allows both practicing psychiatrists and those in training to develop a skill set essential to designing, working in, teaching, or promoting an integrated care program within a health care system. Evidence based and timely, Integrated Care: Working at the Interface of Primary Care and Behavioral Health is a must read for clinicians in the brave new world of health care reform.