Behavioral health conditions affect nearly one of five Americans, leading to healthcare costs of $57 billion yearly, notes a 2009 AHRQ brief. Integration of behavioral and physical health services helps to ensure access by all individuals to preventive, ongoing and appropriate behavioral health services as part of a whole-person healthcare approach.

According to 2015 metrics from the Healthcare Intelligence Network (HIN), 62 percent of healthcare organizations have integrated behavioral health and primary care to some degree. The greatest benefit from integrated care is easy access to behavioral health providers, say numerous respondents to HIN's 2015 survey on Integrating Behavioral Health and Primary Care. Their on-site presence facilitates everything from daily huddles of psychologists and primary care physicians for reviewing candidates for behavioral health interventions to warm hand-offs by doctors who schedule patients with behavioral health at the end of a primary care appointment.

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Customized reports, including benchmark results by industry sector, are available upon request.

This white paper is an excerpt from 2015 Healthcare Benchmarks: Integrating Behavioral Health and Primary Care, which captures healthcare's efforts to achieve healthcare parity and honor the joint principles of the patient-centered medical home, including a whole person orientation and provision of coordinated and/or integrated care. Click here for more information.

This 40-page report, based on responses by 113 healthcare organizations to HIN's inaugural industry survey on this emerging trend, compiles a wealth of metrics on current and planned integration, levels of integration achieved, program components, screening tools, challenges, impacts and successes.

Supported with dozens of graphs and tables, these 2015 market metrics capture trends in integration of behavioral health and primary care, including the impact of integration on population health and organizational metrics.

Breaking down findings by high-responding industry sectors, this report includes the following data points:

• Prevalence of integrated programs;
  
• Level of behavioral and physical health integration achieved, as defined by the Center for Integrative Health Solutions;
  
• Use of telehealth for behavioral health consults;
  
• Populations served by integrated programs;
  
• Behavioral health screening tools used in integrated programs;
  
• Program components, including metrics on peer support, substance abuse treatment, Medicaid health homes, case management, and more;
  
• Healthcare professionals belonging to the integrated care team;
  
• Most effective tools, workflows or protocols in integrated programs, in respondents' own words;
  
• Greatest challenges and successes of integrating behavioral health with primary care;
  
• Details on planned program integrations;
  
• The complete June 2015 Integrating Behavioral Health and Primary Care survey tool;