Essay On Integrated Care

Overview:

What is Integrated Care?

Behavioral health conditions and other medical issues often occur at the same time. Traditionally, people with multiple illnesses need to visit different specialists in systems that tend to operate independently of one another with minimal coordination between them. Often this results in individuals not receiving or receiving inappropriate care, and increased healthcare costs. In particular, unmet psychiatric need is a substantial barrier to improving health.

Integrated care is the systematic coordination of primary care and behavioral health care services. Integrated care is a team-based model of care that blends the expertise of mental health, substance abuse, primary care clinicians, and patients and families. The most fully integrated systems provides team-based care that offers behavioral health and general medical treatment within the same setting.

Why is it important/how can it help?

Unmet psychotic need is a significant barrier to improved health outcomes and reduced costs. People with severe mental illness have high rates of
In particular, integrating behavioral care into primary care settings has robust evidence for efficacy. Collaborative care has been demonstrated to have positive effects in different types of patients including cancer patients, diabetic patient, and coronary artery disease patients, and has shown to be effective both inpatient and outpatient medical settings. Compared to traditional care, integrated care has presented improvements in medical outcome measures, functional outcomes measure, mental health measure, and patients and provider satisfaction levels. In addition, integrating care is an opportunity to the eliminate early mortality gap, reach people who cannot or will not access specialty behavioral health care, and provide preventive