RAND Report to the Pennsylvania Health Funders' Collaborative (2009)

From the introduction: "The Pennsylvania Health Funders’ Collaborative seeks to support the development of best practice models for improving population health through the integration of primary care and behavioral health in a coordinated, high-impact way across the Commonwealth. The Collaborative has identified the population of interest as adults with a chronic physical health condition that is managed by their primary care physician (e.g., diabetes, asthma) but who also have behavioral health issues that commonly present in primary care settings (e.g., depression, anxiety, alcoholism). Primary care is understood to include family medicine and general internal medicine across all settings, including federally qualified health centers (FQHCs), nurse managed health centers, private practices, and others, but not including pediatrics or OB/GYN.

"To assist with this effort, the Collaborative contracted with the RAND Corporation to develop a road map for refining the initiative’s scope in such a way that the work to be conducted has a high likelihood of achieving the Collaborative’s desired goals, is practical to implement, and will involve the active participation and support of a wide range of state and community partners. To this end, the RAND project team has undertaken the following tasks: (1) synthesized the results of literature reviews and related studies/programs to identify and describe existing models of integrated care and their key components; (2) identified key stakeholders in the Commonwealth to be interviewed and/or surveyed with regard to the desired scope of the initiative; (3) designed a protocol for the key stakeholder interviews and surveys; (4) sent email surveys to primary care and behavioral health providers across the Commonwealth and conducted telephone interviews with representatives of other key stakeholder groups; (5) analyzed and synthesized the results of the primary data collection; (6) based on the above information, developed a menu of options for the Collaborative to consider regarding how best to move forward with the proposed initiative.

"In this report, we provide a summary of our findings organized into three parts: (1) developing a roadmap for integrating primary care and behavioral health; (2) adapting the roadmap to Pennsylvania; and (3) next steps for implementing the roadmap."

Also see the addendum to this report.