Matthew "Matt" Lindgren, LMFT

newyorker:

A cartoon by Carolita Johnson. Take a look at more cartoons from this week’s issue: http://nyr.kr/1nCSl5n

rulestobehappy:

We must love before we can be loved.  To love others and to be loved by others is a key component of happiness.

Follow The Rules to be Happy

psych2go:

For more posts like these, go visit psych2go

Psych2go features various psychological findings and myths. In the future, psych2go attempts to include sources to posts for the for the purpose of generating discussions and commentaries. This will give readers a chance to critically examine psychology.

smiliu:

Psychiatry a Key Player in Effective Health Reform, APA Says
By Megan Brooks, Medscape

An American Psychiatric Association (APA) work group on healthcare reform outlines key issues facing the field of psychiatry and offers recommendations for action in a report released today.

“Throughout this recent period of change, the focus on behavioral health, which includes mental illnesses and substance use disorders, has begun to shift from a compartmentalized provider approach to an integrated delivery system linking behavioral health and primary care services. This has led to a renewed awareness that mental health is critical to overall health and wellbeing,” the report notes.

The work group was established by the APA board of trustees and chaired by Paul Summergrad, MD, chair of the Department of Psychiatry at Tufts University School of Medicine, Boston, Massachusetts, and president-elect of the APA. The group met numerous times during an 18-month period with input from the board of trustees, the assembly, and relevant councils and components.

Critical Role for Psychiatrists

According to the report, as healthcare reform expands insurance coverage and extends parity of benefits for behavioral health needs, it will be “critical to monitor new developments, models of care, and payment methodologies, and to enforce compliance to ensure patients and families receive the best quality of care.”

“Psychiatry must play a central role in the new patient care and delivery and payment models. These models must include an expanded emphasis on behavioral health,” the report says.

The report also notes that integrated care models “hold promise” in addressing many of the challenges facing the healthcare system, but “more research is needed to build their evidence base, explore their financial impact and define the role of psychiatrists, primary care providers and other behavioral health providers.”

“Psychiatrists, alongside primary care providers, must play a major role in formulating integrated care solutions by defining their role and benefit to patients,” the report recommends. It encourages the National Institutes of Health, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, and other federal agencies to continue their ongoing research and evaluation of these models.

The work group also tackled issues of financing of psychiatric care, concluding that fundamental payment issues, including implementation of parity laws, “must be addressed” to achieve the coverage, access, and new care delivery goals of the Affordable Care Act. This includes the economic impact of integration, Medicaid reimbursement policies, Medicare fee schedule distortions, fee for service payment methodologies, and the structure and management of payment.

IT Challenges Ahead

They conclude that payer and systems’ budgeting mechanisms must include management of psychiatric care within the broader medical healthcare budgets, while protecting core services for those with mental illnesses.

On the subject of quality performance and measurement, the group notes that healthcare reform has accelerated the development and use of performance indicators and recommends that the behavioral health field “become more fully engaged in the development of performance measures.”

“The field must lead on quality metrics for psychiatric care and their consistent adoption across payers and other regulatory entities. This can be accomplished by identifying a few priority areas for improvement, as well as establishing a series of goals covering various areas of practice,” the group advises.

On health information technology (HIT), the group says several “challenges” lie ahead in the behavioral health field. The success of integrated care models is particularly dependent upon the deployment of electronic health records and patient registries, the report says.

The report concludes that HIT “should be a priority focus of communication and education for the psychiatric field, healthcare providers in general, patients, policy makers and the public.”

The report also addresses workforce, work environment, and medical education and training. Its key finding: “Without changes in the workforce, the field will have difficulty meeting the increased demand for specialty psychiatric physician services. Curriculum, accreditation standards, new Continuing Medical Education (CME) trainings and collaboration with primary care practitioners are needed to meet newly insured patient needs as well as provide for new care delivery models.”

The recommendations of the work group “serve as a springboard for discussion and action within the field of psychiatry,” the authors say.

APA. Integrated Care. Full article

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