Academy for Integrating Behavioral Health and Primary Care

Academy for Integrating Behavioral Health and Primary Care

SPECIAL ARTICLE FOR CIHS

The Agency for Health Research and Quality (AHRQ) established the Academy for Integrating Behavioral Health and Primary Care to serve as a national coordinating and resource center that collects, analyzes, synthesizes, and disseminates information that is useful to providers, policymakers, payers, consumers, and researchers. The Academy will engage various stakeholders in primary care and behavioral health as participants who can help advance the field of integration.

The work of the Academy is guided by AHRQ and the National Integration Academy Council (NIAC)and chaired by Frank Verloin deGruy, III, MD, Chair of the Department of Family Medicine at the University of Colorado.  Dr. deGruy and his distinguished NIAC colleagues have expertise in a variety of areas including clinical practice (family medicine, internal medicine, psychiatry, and psychology), policy, financing and sustainability, research, and health information technology. The Academy has created a literature repository, a Web portal, and refined the Collaborative Care Lexicon developed earlier by C.J. Peek and colleagues as early activities. 

The overall objective of the Academy’s web portal is to provide the key components and functions of an effective resource center — information, coordination, dissemination, and networking. The portal is organized around six Divisions: 1) research, 2) education and work force, 3) policy, 4) financing and sustainability, 5) clinical and community, and 6) health IT.

The Academy will strive to unite the integration community in new ways by:

• Providing a forum for strengthening the shared mission, and supporting the joint activities of leaders;
• Serving as a repository for resource materials; identifying the gaps in materials and generating solutions so further progress can be made;
• Drawing on expertise in the field to make integration efforts as efficient, relevant, and meaningful as possible;
• Conducting studies to increase our understanding of integration practice, including an observational study of high functioning integrated care teams and a survey of integration approaches in smaller primary care practices; and
• Reviewing available quality measures for integrated primary care behavioral health.

The Academy Repository builds upon two AHRQ supported systematic reviews of the literature on integration by the Evidence-based Practice Centers (EPC).  The EPC findings were published as an evidence report/technology assessment, “Integration of Mental Health/Substance Abuse and Primary Care” (2009), and as a paper, “Future Research Needs for the Integration of Mental Health/Substance Abuse and Primary Care” (2010). The Academy’s initial work has consisted of conducting  a comprehensive literature search of integration articles published since 2010, and identifying literature published since 2000 on research gaps found in the literature, including those identified in the prioritized list of gaps in the Future Research Needs report. The NIAC selected key/foundational literature on the topic of integration to provide a framework for the modern literature. All of this research is available through a searchable data base on the Web portal.

The Academy Repository enhances previous collections of integration resources by including grey literature references. “Grey literature” is comprised of materials that are not made available through traditional publishing avenues and advances the Academy’s mission of gathering all sources of information on integration. Examples of grey literature in the Repository include reports, dissertations, presentations, newsletters, and websites.