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Integrated Behavioral Health (IBH) is becoming an
important aspect of Primary Care. Use Patient Tools to
streamline detection and help make IBH a profit center for your
practice.
The Problem
As Primary Care embraces it's role as a patient's medical home,
one of the focuses is on producing health rather than just
treating disease. Health, as we all know, is both mind
(psychological) and body (medical). Similar to acute and
sub-acute medical issues, we can generalize and say that acute
psychological has been carved out into the Mental Health (MH)
specialty, but sub-acute Behavioral Health (BH), has by default
stayed with Primary Care.
The problem with this is that traditionally, Primary Care has
been tasked with finding patients with acute psychological issues
and referring them into the MH, while handling sub-acute BH issues
has generally not been a priority, leaving BH under diagnosed and
under treated. Unfortunately, there are tremendous hidden
costs associated with under diagnosis and treatment of
psychological issues. These hidden costs get masked by
procedure-based fee-for-service purchasing of healthcare and need
to be addressed. When you look at the reality of the
situation, a large portion of patients with MH/BH issues are not
being treated and of those being treated, it is estimated
nationally 70% of these services are provided by Primary Care,
making the PCP a default BH provider.
What is being done about it
The result of all this is a shift in perspective. As
demonstrated by the Depression Initiatives in the late 1990s, and
more recently by Integrated Primary Care, Collaborative Family
Healthcare, Depression Collaboratives, Pay-for-Performance
and transparency initiatives, the purchasers of healthcare are
realizing that it is in their best interest to support and
fund much higher levels of detection and treatment of BH in
Primary Care. At the same time, Primary Care is
understanding that it is better quality care and is making BH a
much higher priority through integration and collaboration.
As a general definition, integration is a measure of how much
beyond traditional levels, detection and treatment of BH is being
handled in Primary Care. Conversely, collaboration is a
measure of how much beyond traditional levels, Primary Care is
involved with the detection and treatment of BH in their
practices. A fully integrated and collaborating practice
would have BH professionals as part of the medical team with
seamless detection and treatment of psychological issues.
In this section of the website, which we generically refer to
as Integrated Behavioral Health (IBH), we look in detail at the hidden
costs of under
diagnosis and treatment, discuss several of the
integrated/collaborative implementations
being used today and look at justification
and funding to build a business case
for these implementations. Central to IBH is the concept of
detection for which Patient Tools provides a great solution.
Please Contact
Us to learn more or discuss how Integrated Behavioral Health might work in your
setting.
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