Workshop Session 1A: Placing the Head Back on the Body: Integrated Care Across Substance Use, Mental Illness and Physical Health

What does it take to truly integrate mental illness, substance use, and physical health care delivery? To develop teams that collaborate across these care models and between prescribers, therapists, and administrative team members?
The most common integrated healthcare models are those in which behavioral healthcare providers are embedded in primary care; however, evidence suggests a reverse model of care in which primary care providers are embedded in the behavioral healthcare setting may be most effective for this population (Haack et al., 2019; Colins et al., 2010).

We will describe how we incorporated a primary care workforce into a community mental health center to implement a full continuum of care in outpatient and acute care settings. We will describe the development of a workforce of psychiatric and general medical providers cross-trained in substance use and mental illness. Paradigm shifts, language barriers, and turf wars often accompany and limit integration on this scale. Building on our “lessons learned” we will discuss the paradigm shifts required for prescribers and therapists to collaborate, to incorporate primary and preventive care into case management, to offer rapid access to substance use treatment across the continuum, and to achieve overall robust behavioral health care delivery.