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HealthInsight Oregon is engaging primary care practitioners (PCPs), mental health practitioners, and inpatient psychiatric facilities (IPFs) in an effort to help communities build the connections to close gaps in care for this vulnerable population.
MACRA’s Quality Payment Program implementation date is mere months away (although there are petitions to delay by 6 to 12 months). Nonetheless, with 962 pages of draft rules to unravel – knowing what you need has never been more important. Those 962 pages are important. But they don’t all apply to everyone. That’s where organizations like Q Corp come in.
Embarking upon the primary care transformation journey can at times seem daunting. Enter; the Primary Care Practice Coach! With the guidance of a primary care practice coach the path to transformative care can seem less overwhelming and more exciting.
Integrating behavioral health into primary care can pose many obstacles, including finding behavioral health providers trained to work in primary care. Recently, I was able to speak with multiple clinics around Oregon that have successfully integrated behavioral health, two of the clinics I spoke with address the issue by making their clinics a practicum site for doctoral psychology students.
What does healthcare transformation really mean? What does high quality health care look like? Since 2011 Oregon’s Patient-Centered Primary Care Home Program (PCPCH) has facilitated changes in the way care is delivered at more than 600 primary care practices in Oregon. In 2014 the PCPCH Program released a new set of standards, called Tier 3 STAR, to recognize exceptional practices that have truly transformed into advanced medical homes.
On May 12th I attended the Portland Community College (PCC), Medical Assistant program poster presentations on the core attributes of the Patient-Centered Primary Care Home (PCPCH) model. This is the third time that I’ve attended the PCC Medical Assistant poster presentations on the medical home model.
Our shared interest in effective interaction between primary medical care and mental health care facilitated an ongoing discussion about how our programs could work together more effectively and we began to dream of not just collaboration, but integration. We began to move together toward that goal.
Maggie, a Project Manager with ORPRN, interviewed Juli Gregory, RN, Education Director and Director of ConneXions at Good Shepherd Medical Center to learn more about how community health workers and primary care providers can work together to improve the health of their patients.
Behavioral health integration is a necessary and very beneficial part of patient-centered primary care. Yet it can be difficult to get an integrated behavioral health program started, as there are many moving parts to contend with and different models to choose from.
As community health workers (CHWs) gain further prominence in our health care teams, they are also the subject of various research efforts. In particular, researchers are studying the efficacy, cost-effectiveness, and versatility of CHWs in public health and health care.
