Chapter 5 - Organizing a Collaborative Health Care Delivery System in a Medical Setting

Abstract

The chapter presents a discussion based on the experience with Collaborative Care at HealthCare Partners. The chapter describes how the creation of an integrated system depends upon biomedical providers and behavioral health providers working together side by side. The chapter describes how we merged two different professional disciplines so that these providers are able to accomplish together far more than they could ever accomplish apart. In short, the summary describes the development of a transdisciplinary body of caregivers. The chapter intends to impart not only the development of the system, but how it can be created, implemented, transported, and sustained in other organizations with the result of improving patient health status, patient satisfaction, and provider satisfaction while reducing unnecessary healthcare utilization. The Collaborative Care Project is a pilot program developed to redesign the primary care delivery system to resolve the problems created by the traditional fragmentation of care. It refers to a model of service that relies on the sharing of clinical assessment, planning, and treatment between health care providers trained in behavioral health and biomedicine. The chapter discusses the findings and states that the Collaborative Care Project had significant impact on primary care and behavioral health provider practices, in that more patients were correctly identified, more patients were treated and communication between behavioral health and primary care providers improved.