VIDEO: 'A peek behind the curtain' of behavioral health integration in primary care
Click Here to Manage Email Alerts
Two physicians have offered a rare look at what goes on behind the scenes of working together to integrate behavioral health into primary care.
Anne C. Jones, DO, MPH, FACOFP, an assistant professor of family medicine at Rowan University School of Osteopathic Medicine, and Kaitlin R. Lilienthal, PhD, an assistant director of the Cayuga Integrated Behavioral Health Cayuga Medical Associates, wrote in Annals of Family Medicine that, although family physicians are on the front lines of mental health concerns, they “often feel stymied in their attempts to fully support patients’ biopsychosocial needs within the barriers of a fragmented health care system.”
In the 2010s, Jones and Lilienthal led a group of 20 medical and behavioral health professionals through a practice transformation, using the Primary Care Behavioral Health model to integrate behavioral health into a primary care practice.
Recently, they published an article describing the practice transformation and reflecting on their work. They used a firsthand narrative of a composite character (a college student who screened negative for mood and anxiety concerns but had symptoms of psychomotor depression) who was developed from their years of shared clinical practice “to describe the nuances and success factors involved in behavioral health integration in primary care,” Jones and Lilienthal wrote.
“When Dr. Jones approached me about collaborating on a piece like this, we were talking a little but about how there’s a lot already written in the literature about efficacy related to integrated care, and a lot of really excellent experts who have come before us and talked about how you can make this work successfully and implement it into various settings,” Lilienthal told Healio. “But there’s a little bit less out there that’s kind of like a peek behind the curtain as to what it’s like in the clinical setting to actually facilitate and have a conversation between a behaviorist and a PCP.”