Increased demand for “integration”—of care coordination, consumer data, and consumer services—is being driven by consumers and payers. For consumers, it’s a matter of the experience—a single care coordination process, all relevant information in one place, and a connection between basic medical services and specialty care. For payers, it’s a matter of value—improved health status and less inappropriate use of…

Simply put, integrated health care is the systematic coordination of mental health care with physical health care services. This means aligning behavioral health care (care for ailments such as depression, autism, or addiction disorders) with primary care—such as treatments for broken bones and seasonal flus. The significance for patients and their families with more than…

Providing primary care to patients with mental illness is a challenging task that requires highly skilled, experienced practitioners comfortable with the full array of biopsychosocial problems with which these patients present. For example, understanding the side-effect profiles of the psychiatric medications and their impact on problems such as diabetes and other complex endocrinopathies requires highly…

As the health care market pushes for more value-based payment models—and payers and health plans are looking for new opportunities to reduce overall costs, integrated models of health care delivery offer a viable option. Recent years have seen the move of many payers and health plans to integrating behavioral health and primary care. Models that…