TEAMcare An Integrated Multicondition Collaborative Care Program for Chronic Illnesses and Depression

Patients with poorly controlled diabetes, coronary heart disease, and depression have an increased risk of adverse outcomes. In a randomized, controlled trial, we tested an intervention designed to improve disease control outcomes for diabetes and/or heart disease and coexisting depression. Patients with one or more parameters of poor medical disease control (ie, HbA1c ≥8.5, or SBP >140, or LDL >130) and a Patient Health Questionnaire-9 (PHQ-9) ≥10 were randomized to the TEAMcare intervention or usual care (N = 214). This article will describe the TEAMcare health services model that has been shown to improve quality of care and medical and psychiatric outcomes.

Using Disease Registries to Improve Your Practice Population’s Health

This webinar focuses on effective strategies for engaging justice-involved populations and ways to support individuals transitioning to communities. The speakers shared case studies to illustrate the ways that providers have managed transitions of care and supported people. This session is approved by the American Academy of Family Physicians for up to 1 AMA Level 1 CME credit.

Physician Burnout

The health care environment—with its packed workdays, demanding pace, time pressures, and emotional intensity—can put physicians and other clinicians at high risk for burnout. Burnout is a long-term stress reaction marked by emotional exhaustion, depersonalization, and a lack of sense of personal accomplishment. In recent years, the rising prevalence of burnout among clinicians (over 50 percent in some studies) has led to questions on how it affects access to care, patient safety, and care quality. Burned-out doctors are more likely to leave practice, which reduces patients’ access to and continuity of care. Burnout can also threaten patient safety and care quality when depersonalization leads to poor interactions with patients and when burned-out physicians suffer from impaired attention, memory, and executive function.

ASHP Guidelines on Preventing Diversion of Controlled Substances

Controlled substances (CS) diversion in health systems can lead to serious patient safety issues, harm to the diverter, and significant liability risk to the organization. Diversion driven by addiction puts patients at risk of harm, including inadequate relief of pain, inaccurate documentation of their care in the medical record, exposure to infectious diseases from contaminated needles and drugs, and impaired healthcare worker (HCW) performance. In addition to patient harm, there are regulatory and legal risks to the organization, including fraudulent billing and liability for resulting damages, and decreased community confidence in the healthcare system. These guidelines provide a detailed and comprehensive framework to support organizations in developing their CS diversion prevention program (CSDPP) in order to protect patients, employees, the organization, and the community-at-large. Ultimately, each organization is responsible for developing a CSDPP that complies with applicable federal and state laws and regulations but also one that applies technology and diligent surveillance to routinely review process compliance and effectiveness, strengthen controls, and seek to proactively prevent diversion.

Use of the Family CAGE in Screening for Alcohol Problems in Primary Care

To establish the reliability and validity of the Family CAGE (an acronym indicating Cut down on drinking; Annoyed by complaints about drinking; Guilty about drinking; had an Eye-opener first thing in the morning), a four-item instrument intended to assess family alcohol-related problems.
Counseling Patients in Primary Care: Evidence-Based Strategies

Counseling Patients in Primary Care: Evidence-Based Strategies

Family physicians spend substantial time counseling patients with psychiatric conditions, unhealthy behaviors, and medical adherence issues. Maintaining efficiency while providing counseling is a major challenge. There are several effective, structured counseling...
Implementing Telemedicine in Primary Care: Learning Lessons From Electronic Health Records

Implementing Telemedicine in Primary Care: Learning Lessons From Electronic Health Records

The common narrative is coronavirus disease 2019 happened, payment and policy barriers were quickly lowered, and voila, telemedicine, a technology for which adoption had been slow over the past decade, is, within a matter of months, in widespread and successful use. Fait accompli. On to this narrative has been grafted the hopes that telemedicine will solve other persistent problems, particularly in primary care.

Implementing Care for Alcohol & Other Drug Use in Medical Settings An Extension of SBIRT

This change guide is designed to assist primary care clinicians and leaders to integrate care for patients with unhealthy alcohol and/or other drug use into routine medical care. As behavioral health care is increasingly integrated into medical settings, especially primary care, the focus is often on depression and anxiety. Care for alcohol and/or other drugs is often omitted or minimized, likely reflecting: stigma, lack of workforce training/education, and the traditional separation of care for alcohol and other drugs from traditional health care (e.g., primary care, emergency care, and behavioral health, etc.). This guide expands on and updates the widely recognized model of Screening, Brief Intervention, and Referral to Treatment (SBIRT).

Fighting Back Against the Stigma of Addiction

Untreated drug and alcohol use contributes to tens of thousands of deaths every year and affects the lives of many more people. We have effective treatments, including medications for opioid and alcohol use disorders, that could prevent a significant number of these deaths, but they are not being utilized widely enough, and people who could benefit often do not even seek them out. One important reason is the stigma around those with addiction.

Words Matter: Terms to Use and Avoid When Talking About Addiction

This handout offers background information and tips for providers to keep in mind while using person-first language, as well as terms to avoid to reduce stigma and negative bias when discussing addiction. Although some language that may be considered stigmatizing is commonly used within social communities of people who struggle with substance use disorder (SUD), clinicians can show leadership in how language can destigmatize the disease of addiction.

Advancing Integrated Mental Health Solutions – Collaborative Care Resources

Collaborative Care (CoCM) is a specific type of integrated care developed at the University of Washington that treats common mental health conditions such as depression and anxiety that require systematic follow-up due to their persistent nature. Based on principles of effective chronic illness care, Collaborative Care focuses on defined patient populations tracked in a registry, measurement-based practice, and treatment to target. Trained primary care providers and embedded behavioral health professionals provide evidence-based medication or psychosocial treatments, supported by regular psychiatric case consultation and treatment adjustment for patients who are not improving as expected.

Addressing Burnout and Resilience

Burnout is common in healthcare and has increased during the Covid 19 pandemic. This brief presentation defines burnout and it's consequences. Building resilience is a strategy to reduce and prevent burnout. The presentation defines resilience and provides tips in increase personal resilience and organizational resilience.

Using Registries for Population Health

Registries are important population health tools that allow organizations to collect, organize, aggregate, and utilize the information for a variety of purposes. Maintaining registries for certain disease states such as depression or diabetes provides easy access to results, identification of care gaps, and level of improvement and can lead to adjustments in care as needed. This Short Take video provides an introduction to registries and how to use them.

Mother & Baby Substance Exposure Toolkit

An online resource to provide broad access to resources to clarify best practices to support and improve the care for substance-exposed mothers and newborns. The toolkit includes resources to support screening, assessment, and level of care determination; treatment; transitions of care; and education.

Addiction Free California

The California Department of Health Care Services (DHCS) has implemented the California Medications for Addiction Treatment (MAT) Expansion Project to address the opioid epidemic throughout the state. This website serves as a separate yet complementary resource to the DHCS MAT Expansion Website and provides resources and information related to the four MAT Expansion Project initiatives operated by Health Management Associates. The California MAT Expansion Project aims to increase access to MAT, reduce unmet treatment need, and reduce opioid overdose-related deaths through the provision of prevention, treatment, and recovery activities. The project focuses on individuals experiencing homelessness, youth, rural, and tribal populations with limited MAT access. The California MAT Expansion Project, composed of nearly 30 initiatives, is funded by grants from the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA).

HMAedu – A Learning Management System for Treatment Teams

HMAedu.com is an educational resource specifically designed for training treatment teams about addiction, pain, and behavioral health. With over 25 hours of education through the lens of patient-centered care, users can explore topics of interest or follow the suggested curriculum path. Once a user signs in, the learning management system automatically loads modules that are pertinent to the user’s level of training. This automation allows for consistency in messaging to all providers without delivering information beyond the scope of practice. Each course starts with a TED Talks-style overview that is followed by patient-focused modules of 3-10 minutes each. Each module is traced for completion and can be reported back to the client and individual for tracking purposes.

Motivational Interviewing In Primary Care

Healthcare systems are in the process of reforming themselves to better meet the needs of people with, or at risk of developing, chronic diseases and long-term conditions. One goal of these efforts is the coproduction of activated, informed, engaged, and motivated patients and citizens.

The Process of Enhanced Referral

This brief video explains the process of enhanced referral to improve patient engagement and completion of the referral and improve provider relationships with referrals. Presented by Dr. Lori Raney, Principal, Health Management Associates.

Quick Guide: Building Partnerships to Enhance Care Coordination

This is a short reference guide to developing a structure to enhance the referral experience for providers and service recipients. It covers setting standards for partnership starting with your value proposition. It outlines the continuum of provider relationships from informal agreements through forming a business entity and finally provides initial guidance and further resources for establishing care compacts.
Best Practices in Videoconferencing-Based Telemental Health

Best Practices in Videoconferencing-Based Telemental Health

This document represents a collaboration between the American Psychiatric Association (APA) and the American Telemedicine Association (ATA) to create a consolidated update of the previous APA and ATA official documents and resources in telemental health to provide a...

Advancing Integration of Behavioral Health into Primary Care: A Continuum-Based Framework (for Primary Care Practices)

What is less clear has been how to accomplish that at scale, given the varying types of primary care practices and, in particular, the resource limitations of small and medium-size practices and the complexity of the models that are currently the evidence-based standards for integrating medical and behavioral care. This framework seeks to fill that gap by delineating a series of steps that providers can take to move toward the integration of behavioral health services into their primary care practices.

Dimensions: Tobacco Free Toolkit for Health Care

The toolkit contains a variety of information and resources including a step by step guide about: education about tobacco use skills for engaging people in tobacco cessation discussions efficient methods for assessing readiness to quit information and research on treatments

Peers Speak Out: Priority Outcomes for Substance Use Treatment & Services

The research presented by these three groups seeks to prioritize desired treatment outcomes as defined by diverse people with lived experience. From this information, the researchers crafted recommendations that could help policymakers, providers and researchers develop, implement, reimburse and evaluate more engaging and perhaps effective substance use services.

Core Competencies Framework for Practice Transformation

The goal of the ICTA program is to improve care and Medicaid beneficiary outcomes within three practice transformation core competencies: Delivering person-centered care across the care continuum Using population health analytics to address complex medical, behavioral health, and social needs; and Engaging leadership to support value-based care. This document provides more detail, including sub-elements for each core competency.
Harm Reduction 101: Harm Reduction Basics and Lessons From the Field

Harm Reduction 101: Harm Reduction Basics and Lessons From the Field

People with substance use disorders are at particular risk for overdoses and developing one or more primary conditions or chronic diseases. During this webinar, presenters will discuss harm reduction as a public health approach that aims to reduce harms related to substance use. Presenters will discuss strategies, policies, programs, and practices that aim to minimize negative health, social and legal impacts associated with drug use, drug policies, and drug laws.

AUDIT

The Alcohol Use Disorders Identification Test (AUDIT) is a 10-item screening tool developed by the WHO to assess alcohol consumption, drinking behaviors, and alcohol-related problems.

Early Recovery Tips for Patients

Patients can use this Early Recovery Handout to determine behaviors when cravings or urges arise or behaviors have changed. The document provides strategy to mitigate any behavioral outliers while keeping the patient on track from day to day.

The Next Stage of Buprenorphine Care for Opioid Use Disorder

This article reviews research findings in the following 7 areas: location of buprenorphine induction, combining buprenorphine with a benzodiazepine, relapse during buprenorphine treatment, requirements for counseling, uses of drug testing, use of other substances during buprenorphine treatment, and duration of buprenorphine treatment.

Pocket Guide: Medications for Addiction Treatment of Opioid Use Disorder SAMHSA

The Medication-Assisted Treatment Of Opioid Use Disorder pocket guide to provide guidance on how to assess the need for treatment, referring to higher levels of care if necessary and the approved frequency and route of administration for treatment of Opioid Use Disorder. In addition, a tool has been provided to determine clinical opiate withdrawal.

Providing Culturally Sensitive, Patient Centered Care

During the webinar, the presenter will focus on ways to address health equity issues and key considerations for providing linguistically effective services. The presenter will discuss best practices and models to support patients in these challenging times.

Understanding the Brain and Treatment for People with Opioid Use Disorders

Understanding the brain chemistry associated with opioid use disorder treatment is essential: Medications for Addiction Treatment (MAT) restores depleted dopamine in the brain so people impacted by OUD can regain functioning. Recognizing this, therapy and support services for OUD are most effective when provided in accordance with a person's healing process and readiness to engage in treatment.