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.