A Technical Integration of Primary Care into a Behavioral Health Site

People with persistent mental illness experience more chronic disease and co-morbidities than the general population, impacting their quality of life and increasing the cost of health care. In spite of the increased need for primary care services, people with mental illness encounter barriers to health care including lack of access to care, and a shortage of both primary care and psychiatric care providers. While this challenge was previously addressed by attempting to integrate behavioral health care into primary care settings, recent research indicates that a more successful model is reversed shared care, or the integration of primary care into a behavioral health site. Integration may take many forms including standardized integration, interpersonal integration, technical integration, and physical integration. The goal of this technical integration project is to integrate primary care assessment information, medication lists, and laboratory results into holistic behavioral health assessment with the use of a health information exchange (HIE) tool as a first step towards reversed shared care