An internist’s cancer scare helps show her how care can be improved.
As an internist and infectious disease physician, I am, unfortunately, often the one who has to deliver bad news to patients and their families. But this time, as I sat in the urologist’s office in January, the dreaded words were directed at me: “You likely have cancer.”
Kaiser Permanente and National Council for Behavioral Health Team Up to Provide Training to Community Health Centers
More than half of all U.S. residents have experienced a traumatic event, like domestic abuse, sexual assault, neglect, or disasters. The ideal place to identify and to show universal precautions is within primary care settings.
With support from Kaiser Permanente, the National Council for Behavioral Health is pioneering an educational program for community health centers to become trauma-informed practices and models for replication.
New Jersey taxpayers could save hundreds of millions of dollars a year and thousands of patients could have improved health and better quality of life if clinicians coordinated physical and mental health care, a new Rutgers University study says.
The report, produced by the Center for State Health Policy, found that more than a third of the $880 million in hospitalization costs in the 13 communities it studied were associated with behavioral health issues such as mental health disorders and substance use.
Harvard Pilgrim Health Care is working with health care providers throughout the region on an innovative, multi-faceted plan to better coordinate behavioral and medical health care for patients. As part of this initiative, Harvard Pilgrim has made quality grants to selected providers who are working to integrate these two facets of health care. Integration is of particular interest to those providers involved in Patient Centered Medical Homes (PCMH), a model that emphasizes care coordination among a patient’s specialists and primary care providers.
Using a nurse case-manager-based collaborative primary care team can cut depressive symptoms in patients with type 2 diabetes, according to a study published online Oct. 14 in Diabetes Care.
According to Brenda Reiss-Brennan, PhD, mental health integration director for Intermountain Healthcare, the first step toward integrating behavioral health into primary care is to stop thinking of patients with mental health issues as “other.”
Several years ago, a college student asked me for feedback about an essay she’d written. I usually enjoy helping young writers, but this
request made me very uncomfortable. In the essay, the student detailed her long struggle with depression, including several hospitalizations and suicide attempts. She mentioned in the last paragraph that sometimes she still wished she were dead.
