Integrated behavioral health care is an emerging field with the potential to improve health outcomes for patients and health care delivery within practices. Integrated behavioral health care can systematically enhance a primary care practice’s ability to effectively address behavioral health issues that naturally emerge in the primary care, prevent fragmentation between behavioral health and medical care, and create effective relationships with mental health specialists outside the primary care setting.
As greater numbers of primary care practices and health systems begin to design and implement integrated behavioral health services, there is a growing need for quality measures that are rigorous and appropriate to the specific characteristics of different approaches to integration.
The Atlas of Integrated Behavioral Health Care Quality Measures (the IBHC Measures Atlas) aims to support the field of integrated behavioral health care measurement by:
- Presenting a framework for understanding measurement of integrated care;
- Providing a list of existing measures relevant to integrated behavioral health care; and
- Organizing the measures by the framework and by user goals to facilitate selection of measures.
Population of focus: The IBHC Measures Atlas was developed for practices and teams that wish to understand if they are providing high-quality integrated behavioral health care or are preparing to implement integrated care. Individuals in clinical, administrative, accounting, policy, or patient advocacy roles may each find concepts and measures of interest in the IBHC Measures Atlas. Researchers and measurement experts can use the Atlas to identify appropriate measures for integration research and may find the IBHC Measures Atlas useful to identify where there are gaps in available measures and development efforts are needed.
Link to resource: http://integrationacademy.ahrq.gov/atlas
Date: 2013
Organization: Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality