Primary and Behavioral Healthcare Integration: Threat or Opportunity for Addiction Treatment Organizations?

Excerpt

Nationwide, health care systems are experiencing an increasingly rapid pace of health reforms, especially in burgeoning areas such as health homes, accountable care organizations, which emphasize the growing need for bidirectional integration of primary care and behavioral health. Several articles in this issue of the Journal of Behavioral Health Services & Research explore care that requires collaboration between primary and behavioral health: “Predictors of primary care physicians’ self-reported intention to conduct suicide risk assessments” by Lisa M Hooper et al., “Outcomes associated with a cognitive-behavioral chronic pain management program implemented in three public HIV primary care clinics” by Jodie Anne Trafton et al., and the “Relationship between neighborhood characteristics and recruitment into adolescent family-based substance use prevention programs” by Hilary F. Byrnes et al. However, is this emphasis on integration a threat or opportunity for specialty addiction treatment organizations? …