A Guidebook of Professional Practices for Behavioral Health and Primary Care Integration: Observation from Exemplary Sites

This project aimed to identify a set of professional practices for primary care organizations to follow and thereby to succeed at integration of behavioral health and primary care. This guidebook demonstrates the breadth of organizational and individual professional practices that are needed for high-quality integrated care delivery. Organizations can use this guidebook to work toward achieving a level of integrated care seen in some of the best primary care organizations in the country. Moreover, policymakers may find this guidebook useful to identify benchmarks for assessing integrated care in primary care organizations.

With such rich data, many interesting research questions emerge from this work. Areas for exploration could include examining how communication among professionals and patients differs in integrated settings and non-integrated settings, how the professional practices identified here are connected to clinical outcomes, and how these practices can be best implemented and disseminated to primary care organizations motivated to integrate care for the patients they serve.