Maria, RN By three in the afternoon, the clinic always felt a little frayed at the edges. The hum of printers, the faint ring of unanswered phone lines, the blinking of notices for new results — it all blended into the kind of background noise you stop noticing until the day feels heavy. It was […]
Why We Need Dedicated Integrated Care Directors — At Every Level of the Health System If you’ve spent any time in the integrated care space, you know the pattern: A grant funds a pilot. A bold health plan tries something innovative. A state rolls out a value-based model. Then people move on, funding dries up, […]
The Firestarter Framework: Fueling Passion and Purpose Dr. Thomas opened her session delving into the Firestarter Framework to explore our personal journeys in Integrated Care leadership and inspire participants to carry the CFHA “spark” home after the conference, igniting ongoing passion for integration. This framework classifies drivers of change into three groups. These Firestarter types […]
What’s New in the MOUD Playbook The updated Playbook offers several key enhancements: · A stronger emphasis on low-barrier, person-centered care. The Playbook underscores that using MOUD saves lives and should not be withheld due to continued substance use or resistance to counseling. It highlights the need for stigma reduction, appropriate levels of care, and […]
Bion’s Relevance in Modern Healthcare The psychoanalytic perspectives of Bion, especially his concepts of container-contained thinking, thinking under pressure, and emotional truth, appear conceptually distant from the practical and fast-paced demands of integrated healthcare. Yet it is precisely in this setting, where clinicians must think quickly while holding complex emotions, that Bion becomes indispensable. According […]
The Value of a Pearls Gathering At the end of the first pandemic year, BHCs from multiple sites at the Pediatric Physicians’ Organization at Children’s (PPOC) convened to reflect on what we called the “Pearls of 2020 – Staying Integrated During the Pandemic.” The Pearls initiative identified six key elements of integration, each of which […]
Third Culture Kids (TCKs) are children of expatriates who spend a significant part of their upbringing in a culture different from their own or their parents’ nationality. The term TCK stems from the presence of three cultural influences in their lives: their heritage culture(s), the host country culture(s), and the culture of expatriates and other TCKs. […]
Interestingly the word “Jenga” does not mean “angst derived from a predestinated tower of calamity.” Jenga’s roots are in Swahili from the word “kujenga” meaning “to build” (“Jenga”, 2025). Jenga got me thinking about integrated care on one of these fun Saturday nights. We take the warm handoff on the behavioral health side (or provide […]
Dear Mr. Kennedy, First, thank you for bringing urgency and passion to the nation’s conversation on health and the chronic disease epidemic. Your desire to reimagine our approach to well-being is one that we share as a 30-year-old upstart association rooted in the fundamental idea that our health system is disintegrated. At the Collaborative Family […]
One other thing that made this meeting memorable was the appearance of T-shirts that express loyalty to a model of integrated care. It started with the PCBH T-shirts, but by the end of the conference I was seeing CoCM T-shirts as well. This made literal the process that I have been thinking about for several […]
Howard Thurman, a spiritual founder of the civil rights movement once wrote, “Don’t ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive, and go do it. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.” His words challenge us to resist stagnation, conformity, and systems that stifle our ability to effect meaningful change. […]
The review underscores the importance of integrating behavioral health into the public health agenda, opposing the health-detrimental effects of anti-immigration policies and calling for collective efforts to advocate for policy changes. This call for action urges healthcare professionals, policymakers, and advocates to evaluate the intersection of immigration policies and behavioral health, emphasizing that global health […]
I’m going to make an argument here that the antidote to political uncertainty and rapid change in the healthcare landscape is community, particularly local community. And in so doing I’m also tying us to a promise that this community, the Collaborative Family Healthcare Association (CFHA), will be a nexus of moral strength and innovation for […]
The following was prepared by the UMass Center for Integrated Primary Care, for more information about CIPC courses for behavioral clinicians, physicians, and other members of the primary care team, visit: www.umassmed.edu/cipc Daniel Mullin, PsyD MPH, director of the Center for Integrated Primary Care (CIPC), began his involvement with primary care transformation more than a […]
If you are a clinician you know the feeling. It’s that moment in a care process with a patient where you could do more or choose to do less. You battle internally to decide what to do and ultimately you know you can’t live with yourself if you choose to do less. That’s our moment as […]
5 minute read My first job after postdoctoral training was at a family medicine residency program in central North Carolina. It was exactly what I wanted: a combination of direct patient care, graduate medical education, and program development. I took over for Dan Marlowe, another medical family therapist who left to join the faculty at […]
Five minute read “She was visibly upset while she talked about the confrontation with her brother,” I said. “And then suddenly she stood up, arms wide open, asking for a hug.” “And what did you do?” my clinical supervisor asked. “What else could I do? I gave her a hug!” My supervisor smiled. “I want […]
7 minute read From the fifth floor window of the resident lounge, I could see the downtown Chicago skyline in the distance from Hinsdale Hospital. The Hinsdale Family Medicine Residency building was across the street from the hospital I would call home for the next 3 years, connected by an underground tunnel that came in […]
