Overview

Primary care settings often struggle to meet behavioral health needs of their patients, yet the need for these services is pronounced

Previous studies have found that 40% of primary care patients need behavioral health care and, of those referred to specialty mental health services, up to 90% do not proceed with this follow-up. Instead, roughly half are treated solely in primary care settings, a circumstance requiring new collaborations among primary care providers and fresh configurations of primary care delivery.

Dr. Littenberg’s presentation details the challenges and opportunities of behavioral health and primary care integration and shares early findings of a multi-state Patient Centered Outcomes Research Initiative clinical trial testing integration models. The overall aim is to illustrate promising practices for local replication and expansion.

This presentation is followed up with a Rhode Island perspective in our third webinar: Integrated Primary Care in Rhode Island

Learning Objectives

Following completion of this activity learners will be able to:

• Describe current tools / instruments for measuring degree of behavioral health integration in primary care practices.
• Discuss the interaction between behavioral and medical problems.
• Explain/discuss to the delivery of behavioral health care in primary care settings.
• List practice and patient outcomes that can be used to assess the effect of behavioral health integration into primary care.
• Identify evidence-based behavioral health treatments.

Speakers

Benjamin Littenberg, MD

Benjamin Littenberg is an Internist specializing in Primary Care with research interests in epidemiology, 

health services delivery, quality improvement, public health and technology assessment. He has done randomized clinical trials, decision models, and meta-analyses, as well as analyses of large data sets.

Dr. Littenberg is the Henry and Carleen Tufo Professor of Medicine as well as Professor of Nursing, Director of General Internal Medicine, and Director of the Graduate Program in Clinical and Translational Science at the University of Vermont. He received his medical degree from Case Western Reserve University and trained in internal medicine at Hartford (Connecticut) Hospital. He was a Robert Wood Johnson Clinical Scholar at Stanford University before becoming Assistant Professor of Medicine at Dartmouth. Following an appointment as Associate Professor of Medicine at Washington University in St. Louis, he assumed his present position in 1999.

He also founded and serves as Chief Medical Officer of Patient Engagement Systems, a company whose NIH clinical trial-validated chronic disease decision support tools for providers and patients is being utilized in primary care across the country.

Dr. Littenberg’s research interests center on technology assessment and quality improvement. Recent projects include new ways to measure quality of care in chronic disease, novel strategies for reporting test results to patients, the effect of the built environment on health outcomes, and strategies to integrate behavioral and primary care. In Vermont, Dr. Littenberg has developed statewide registry-based approaches to quality and safety improvement with the Vermont Breast Cancer Surveillance System and as Principal Investigator of the Vermont Diabetes Information System. He is Principal Investigator of “Integrating Behavioral Health and Primary Care for Comorbid Behavioral and Medical Problems,” a large pragmatic effectiveness trial funded by the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute.

He has designed and taught graduate courses on “Designing Clinical Research”, “Analysis of Big (Secondary) Data”, “Assessing Diagnostic Technologies” and “Medical Error”.