Poster Paper: Primary Care-Behavioral Health Integration: The Policy Context and Current Technology Infrastructure

Friday, November 7, 2014
Ballroom B (Convention Center)

*Names in bold indicate Presenter

Cynthia M. Throop, RTI International, Inc.
With the growing recognition that behavioral health is inseparable from physical health, primary care-behavioral health integration is an increasingly important, but relatively unfamiliar area of health policy. While recent health policy has focused on encouraging the adoption and use of health information technology (IT) to improve health care, these efforts are aimed at ‘regular’ health care organizations and providers and have limited impact on behavioral health care organizations and providers. The same is true, perhaps to a lesser extent, of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA). The purpose of this paper is to understand the landscape related to primary care-behavioral health integration and health IT in order to lay the groundwork for policy development within the context of health care reform (the ACA). The paper, based on a literature review, will describe and discuss the current behavioral health IT landscape, including the current technological infrastructure available to support primary care-behavioral health integration and models to understand and promote effective integration. Recent efforts to include behavioral health organizations, providers, and data into health IT adoption and health information exchange efforts will ground discussions of policies and relevant conceptual frameworks at a practical, on-the-ground, level.