Julie M. Schirmer

THE DEVELOPMENT OF JOINT PRINCIPLES: INTEGRATING BEHAVIORAL HEALTH CARE INTO THE PATIENT-CENTERED MEDICAL HOME

The world of primary care was galvanized in 2007 by the publication of the Joint Principles of The Patient-Centered Medical Home (PCMH) that spells out the fundamental features of a primary health care setting in which a team of clinicians offers accessible first-contact primary care.[1][1] This

Joint principles: integrating behavioral health care into the patient-centered medical home.

The Patient-centered Medical Home (PCMH) is an innovative, improved, and evolving approach to providing primary care that has gained broad acceptance in the United States. The Joint Principles of the PCMH, formulated and endorsed in February 2007, are sound and describe the ideal toward which we

A Collaborative Needs Assessment and Work Plan in Behavioral Medicine Curriculum Development in Vietnam

An important aspect of family medicine education in the United States and abroad is behavioral medicine. Interpersonal and communication skills, mental health assessment, and sensitivity to diverse patient populations are areas of curricular importance. This article describes the behavioral medicine portion of a family medicine consultation with Vietnam, in progress since 1999. The needs assessment for behavioral medicine reveals few monetary or personnel resources available for training family physicians or caring for patients with mental health problems. Challenges of conducting crosscultural consultations are many and include confronting language barriers,

Joint principles: Integrating behavioral health care into the patient-centered medical home

The Patient-centered Medical Home (PCMH) is an innovative, improved, and evolving approach to providing primary care that has gained broad acceptance in the United States. The Joint Principles of the PCMH, formulated and endorsed in February 2007, are sound and describe the ideal toward which we aspire. However, there is an element running implicitly through these joint principles that is difficult to achieve yet indispensable to the success of the entire PCMH concept. The incorporation of behavioral health care has not always been included as practices transform to accommodate to the PCMH ideals. This is an alarming development because the PCMH will be incomplete and ineffective without the full incorporation of this element, and retrofitting will be much more difficult than prospectively integrating into the original design of the PCMH. Therefore we offer a complementary set of joint principles that recognizes the centrality of behavioral health care as part of the PCMH. This document follows the order and language of the original joint principles while emphasizing what needs to be addressed to insure incorporation of the essential behavioral elements. It is intended to supplement and not replace the original Joint Principles document, which still stands.

Sailing smoothly across the cultural divide Constructing effective behavioral science presentations for medical audiences

Beginning behavioral science faculty, who are critical residency program contributors, face significant immediate challenges that often diminish their effectiveness and increase the time it takes to translate and reformat their expertise into relevant and meaningful educational presentations. Residency program culture and competency-based learning are quite different from the educational objectives and teaching environments found in most behavioral health training programs. The goal of this article is to provide beginning behavior science faculty, who are typically on their own and learning on the job, with a guide to the core educational perspectives and skills required as well as key resources that are available to them. Since a significant portion of behavioral science faculty’s teaching time revolves around small and large group presentations, our guide focuses on how to incorporate key strategies and resources into relevant, evidenced-based and, most importantly, effective behavioral health presentations for the program’s resident physicians. Specifically, our recommendations include selection of content, methods of content organization, techniques for actively engaging resident physicians in discussing the significance of the topics, and descriptions of numerous Internet resources for the primary mental health topics that concern family medicine trainees. Finally, it is emphasized that the relevant and effective use of these recommendations is dependent upon the behavioral science faculty educator’s first understanding and appreciating how physicians’ think, speak, and prioritize information while caring for their patients.

The development of joint principles: Integrating behavioral health care into the patient-Centered medical home

This article describes the development of the Joint Principles of The Patient-Centered Medical Home (PCMH) by the Working Party Group on Integrated Behavioral Healthcare. The Joint Principles establish the primacy of integrated behavioral health care as a core principle of the PCMH.