Three years ago the Collaborative Family Healthcare Association (CFHA) set out to report on the spread of integrated care across the United States primary care system. Our initial report on findings in 2020 elicited interesting findings on the breadth and types of care being provided. Here we provided updated data which appears to demonstrate greater […]
5 Minute Read There is no single issue in the movement to integrate physical and behavioral health system that trumps the workforce shortage and training problem. Primary care needs a moonshot initiative to bridge that gap. I have some ideas. They are mine alone – I can’t speak for all of the Collaborative Family Healthcare […]
5 Minute Read Family medicine residency programs have long had behaviorists as part of the educational experience for physicians-in-training, but the role has not kept up with the many changes in training and healthcare over the last few decades. And so you have behavioral science faculty with unclear and often conflicting mandates for their work, […]
5 Min Read. Filling that integrated care position at your clinic feel tough? You are not alone. Positions for mental health professionals of all types in primary care have grown in the last few years (see our job board and our map) and the options for mental health professionals have also expanded with telehealth uptake, […]
There are many good reasons for the strain and experience of burnout among healthcare professionals at-large and primary care teams specifically, but there may be a hidden factor affecting your integrated behavioral health staff that you may not have yet considered: role diffusion. The shorthand version for this phenomenon is, “your staff is trying to […]
Five Minute Read We were curious about how our members utilize social media and connectivity tools, so we asked and they answered. The results are fascinating and will help us plan future efforts to support networking amongst the members of our association, the Collaborative Family Healthcare Association (CFHA). Why should you care? Well, read on […]
Five Minute Read Operating as a behavioral health consultant (BHC) in primary care has always demanded flexibility but never more so than during the pandemic. Things have changed significantly and it’s worthwhile for us to reflect on those changes, not with resistance, but simply with acknowledgment and mindfulness about what those changes mean. So, this […]
Our community is a rarity in the healthcare world. We do not represent a guild. We do not represent a sector of the healthcare industry. We do not represent a disease category. We represent an idea. That idea is that healthcare works best when professionals, in tandem with families and their communities, work together within […]
10 Minute Read Our conversations tell us a lot about who we are, so we thought it would be a good idea to review our top list serve conversations for 2020. Before those of you who are not members of the Collaborative Family Healthcare Association (CFHA) stop reading, let me convince you as to why […]
5 Minute Read This is a first. To our knowledge no systematic effort to account for the number of practices providing integrated behavioral health services in the United States has been undertaken, other than efforts to identify colocated providers in a geographical space. To be sure the data collected has its limitations and this blog […]
5 Minute Read There is a necessary connection between our work in integrating behavioral health and medicine and the work of rooting out racism in health care. That connection lies at the root of what those of us who call ourselves champions of integrated care are doing: we are reforming a fragmented and too-often ineffective […]
3 Minute Read I’ve been tempted to throw my laptop/ iPhone across the room in recent weeks. This coronavirus thing and the political and economic chaos it has wrought, not to mention the morbidity and mortality that accompanies it have pushed me to the brink. And many healthcare professionals have intimated to me that they […]
2 Minute Read: It seems as if 2020 is the year of perpetual transition as we adjust and learn, adjust and learn. Our last few weeks as a membership has been spent thinking about returning to in-person visits (or not) and concurrently thinking about how our personal lives mirror this transition as states “re-open.” Below […]
3 Minute Read CFHA members have worked hard in the last 9 weeks responding to the various challenges posed by the pandemic. These challenges are not going away, however, a great deal of progress has been made in adapting clinical delivery to telehealth, figuring out the economics of all of this and working on the […]
This blog is a follow-up to a recent panel presentation co-sponsored by Comagine, The Institute for Primary Care Behavioral Health and the Collaborative Family Healthcare Association. The chat for the presentation is here. Video is here or just scroll down. What started out as deep consternation as the COVID pandemic hit in March quickly turned […]
The realities of the pandemic are settling in among our membership and more of our conversation is turning to the long-term implications. We are concerned about our fellow healthcare providers, our patients and the economic realities that healthcare is facing along with the rest of the world. At the same time there is a sense […]
You know things are weird when behavioral health visits are outpacing primary care visits (at least as far as percentage increases) at many health centers. This is one of several paradoxes of the COVID-19 era along with the finding that many (if not most?) patients are preferring phone visits to video consults – which is […]
The second week of April saw our community settle into the COVID-19 era with better established telehealth practices and a better sense of what the near-term would hold for the provision of healthcare. This knowledge did little to diminish the uncertainty of the long-term outlook for healthcare teams, particularly for primary care where the economic […]
