Improving Integration of Behavioral Health Into Primary Care for Adolescents and Young Adults

Abstract

Problems related to mood, substance use, anxiety, body image issues, post-traumatic stress, and suicidality are common in adolescence and become even more common in young adulthood. Integrated behavioral health (IBH) in primary care has shown great promise in identifying and treating adolescents and young adults who have these problems. Treatment outcomes in IBH settings outperform those in usual primary care settings where a primary care provider may identify behavioral health problems and refer youth to colocated or outside behavioral health specialists. Despite the success of IBH care systems, limited training opportunities and inadequate financial compensation for these services jeopardize the wide scale expansion and universal adoption of IBH. To optimize patient care, providers from all disciplines in adolescent primary care settings should have dedicated professional training in IBH. This should include incorporating IBH professional competencies into each discipline's formal training program and building interprofessional, multidisciplinary IBH training settings. Likewise, payers should work with primary care systems to create and implement reimbursement models for IBH services. Efforts to expand the footprint of IBH would pay off significantly by building more worldwide BH systems with increased efficacy at identifying and treating adolescents with BH conditions.