Team-Based care on WIHI

Madge Kaplan writes:

The next WIHI broadcast — The Road to Team-Based Primary Care and Behavioral Health — will take place on Thursday, December 4, from 2 to 3 PM ET, and I hope you'll tune in.

Our guests will include:

• Ed Wagner, MD, MPH, Director Emeritus, MacColl Center for Health Care Innovation; Senior Investigator, Group Health Research Institute
• Robin Henderson, PsyD, Chief Behavioral Health Officer & Vice President, Strategic Integration, St. Charles Health System (Bend, Oregon)
• Parinda Khatri, PhD, Chief Clinical Officer, Cherokee Health Systems (Knoxville, Tennessee)
• Cindy Hupke, BSN, MBA, Director, Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI)
• Mara Laderman, MSPH, Senior Research Associate, IHI
  

Primary care practices across the US are facing a number of important challenges right now; prominent among them is doing a much better job at recognizing and helping patients with behavioral health issues. The operative term for this is “integration” — a notion that ranges from, at minimum, co-locating behavioral health services and counselors in primary care settings; to, at best, everyone on staff having greater training and skills to detect and address the mental health and behavioral challenges that may be impacting a patient’s health. And, together as a clinical team, working with patients on ‘whole person’ solutions. Achieving this level of capacity doesn’t happen overnight, but we’re going to discuss why it’s an essential aim on the December 4 WIHI: The Road to Team-Based Primary Care and Behavioral Health.

Our guides on this WIHI include Dr. Ed Wagner, whose work in chronic care and primary care redesign is legendary. Dr. Wagner has most recently been focused on identifying effective practice models around the country as part of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation initiative known as Learning from Effective Ambulatory Practices, or LEAP. A strong commitment to behavioral health integration is often a standout feature of primary care practice transformation. The St. Charles and Cherokee Health Systems are cases in point. We’ll learn from Robin Henderson and Parinda Khatri about efforts to forge deeper linkages between behavioral health and primary care at their organizations; these efforts have already begun to demonstrate better patient outcomes and lower costs. Finally, we have IHI’s Cindy Hupke and Mara Laderman with us, each of whom has a hand in researching and teaching the programmatic designs necessary to help primary care teams engage in behavioral health integration. We look forward to engaging with you on the topic of behavioral health integration on December 4.

You can enroll for the broadcast here. We'd also appreciate it if you would spread the word about the show via Twitter.