Integrated Primary Care

The concept of integrated primary care is quickly taking hold in today's market-driven reorganization of health care. The current health care trend is toward primary care and away from specialty services; toward care managed by a primary care physician as gatekeeper and away from patients shopping to find the right specialist for each different ailment; toward capitated relationships in which the providers are paid to do what is necessary to keep a population healthy rather than for every service they provide. Although evidence has been accumulating for years that the separation of "emotional" and "physical" problems into separate "mental health" and "medical" treatment tracks is a poor reflection of how human problems are generated and how they are best resolved, only now is there a growing economic incentive to more effectively address these problems, even if it means changing the structure of caregiving as it has previously existed. Integrated Primary Care makes a strong case for this growing movement, for the colocation of mental health and primary care provider. In eleven chapters, Blount and his contributors describe best practices in integrated care and spend as much effort showing how to successfully develop and implement these programs in different settings as they do arguing for their usefulness.