3 minute read The emerging COVID-19 vaccine rollout is a potential knockout blow for a pandemic that has wreaked havoc on the wellbeing of individuals and families across the globe. A new article from the editors at Families, Systems, and Health reviews the challenges of vaccine dissemination and uptake and recommends the mobilization of interprofessional […]
Here’s What You Were Talking About In 2020
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 […]
Tough Talks: When Kiddos Share Suicidal Thoughts and Feelings in Primary Care
Five minute read Hearing a child or youth say that they want to die can be a scary experience for any behavioral health professional. When I was a newly minted BHC, I found myself in a complex juggling act of supporting my medical team, taking my patient’s suicidal ideation (SI) seriously while understanding variations in […]
How widespread is integrated care?
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 […]
A Tool for Medical Providers to Evaluate Family Functioning
3 minute read Reprint. Original post available here. Family functioning is one way to measure how a family meets its physical and psychological needs; in other words, it quantifies the family’s emotional environment1,2. Family functioning has been found to be associated with chronic physical and mental illness in children3–6; however, family functioning is not consistently […]
We Can End Racism In Our House
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 […]
Don’t Quit: We Can Outlast All Of This
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 […]
Transitioning Again? Reopening Primary Care
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 […]
Settling Into The New Normal
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 Is The Golden Age For Behavioral Health: Will It Become The Golden Age For Primary Care?
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 […]
Looking Towards The Long-Term Implications of The Pandemic
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 […]
The Upside Down World of COVID-19
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 […]
Settling Into The Quarantine Period
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 […]
COVID-19: Week 4 In Review
The first week of April saw our community solidify workflow changes to telehealth and continue to note the toll of the pandemic financially across the healthcare sector. Although less content overall was shared on our listserves compared to the initial weeks of the crisis it was clear community members were hard at work figuring things […]
COVID-19: Week 3 In Review
The last week of March saw diminished COVID-19 information on our list serves as members turned to their new clinic workflows and new normals. Large questions still remained about reimbursement for telework, workflows for integrated care teams and the sustainability of the current situation. As a service to members and to the general public we […]
COVID-19: Week 1 In Review
CFHA members (click to join) as usual stepped up to the plate to support each other and to begin to collectively frame a response to the COVID-19 pandemic. As a service to members and to the general public we will be posting weekly updates of our conversations and resource sharing efforts here. Because these are […]
Research Review
I hope this Research Review blog post finds you virus-free and in good spirits. We are living through history right now with the COVID pandemic. Perhaps this post will give you a break from the ongoing disruptions. This is the post where I save you time searching the hottest integrated/collaborative care research literature by doing […]
The Never-ending Story of Integrated Care
A few years ago, I went to a Festschrift for Steve Zyzanski, one of my revered mentors, on the occasion of his retirement. A large group of us gathered to celebrate his life, his contributions, to collectively tell his story and celebrate the greatness of his life’s work. So after all our hot air and […]