Benjamin Miller

As President of Well Being Trust, Benjamin F. Miller, PsyD, oversees the implementation of the foundation’s strategies and full portfolio of investments and partnerships to help Well Being Trust have a real-world impact on America’s mental health and addiction crisis. These responsibilities build on those in Dr. Miller’s prior role as Chief Strategy Officer of Well Being Trust, through which he ensured alignment across the foundation’s grants, research, partnerships and policy recommendations.

Dr. Miller is a nationally recognized mental health expert and a highly sought-after public speaker. Dr. Miller has presented around the world on the need to make mental health an integral part of health care, most recently testifying before the Senate Committee on Finance about the need for an integrated approach to treating mental health and addiction  He is also the author of the weekly newsletter Mental: Fighting the fragmentation of mental health one policy at a time, where hundreds of subscribers gather to read about how everyday happenings are connected to mental health and what actions they can take to address them.

In addition, Dr. Miller has been featured in numerous local and national media outlets – the New York Times, CNN, NBC News, USA Today, NPR, PBS NewsHour, among countless others – and today maintains advisory and adjunct professor positions at the following organizations: Inseparable; the University of Colorado School of Medicine’s Eugene S. Farley, Jr. Health Policy Center; Mental Health Colorado; the Stanford School of Medicine’s Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences; and the British Journal of General Practice. He was previously president of the Collaborative Family Healthcare Association and an Institute for Healthcare Improvement faculty member.

Dr. Miller’s expertise in this space largely stems from the early days of his career. In receiving his doctorate in clinical psychology from Spalding University in Louisville, Kentucky, completing his predoctoral internship at the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center, and working as a postdoctoral fellow in primary care psychology at the University of Massachusetts Medical School in the Department of Family Medicine and Community Health, Dr. Miller gained firsthand insight into our country’s foster care, education, healthcare and criminal justice systems. He helped emotionally disturbed children navigate school, individuals with breast cancer cope with their diagnosis, prisoners plan for a successful return to society, and trained primary care physicians on how to best handle their patients’ mental and behavioral health concerns – experiences that showed Dr. Miller how the continued marginalization of mental health in America has ripple effects throughout every layer of society.

This realization inspired Dr. Miller to become a principal investigator on several federal grants, foundation grants, and state contracts related to comprehensive primary care and mental health, behavioral health, and substance use integration. And during the eight years he spent as an associate professor in the Department of Family Medicine at the University of Colorado School of Medicine, it contributed to him becoming a founding director of the Eugene S. Farley, Jr. Health Policy Center. Under Dr. Miller’s leadership, the Farley Health Policy Center evaluated policies related to behavioral health integration, payment reform, workforce response and preparedness, and community-based prevention to help key decision makers positively improve mental health in their communities.

Dr. Miller has received numerous awards for his work, which includes leading the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality’s Academy for Integrating Behavioral and Primary Care project, the Sustaining Healthcare Across Integrated Primary Care Efforts (SHAPE) project, and acting as a technical expert for multiple CMS panel discussions. He has also written and published extensively on enhancing the evidentiary support for integrated models, increasing the training and education of behavioral health providers in medical settings, and the need to address specific health policy and payment barriers for successful integration. Dr. Miller was the lead author on the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Culture of Whole Health report, which provided specific direction to advance mental health nationally, and is on the editorial board for Families, Systems and Health.

Dr. Miller’s work has taken him into communities all across the country, from the Rocky Mountains in Colorado to the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains in Chattanooga, Tennessee, where he currently plays music, paints, and spends time with his wife and daughters.

Contributed To

September 19, 2014 - Resource
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