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NIH Integrated Health Improvement Strategies Workgroup: April 14-15, 2010 Natcher Conference Center Conference Purpose: Identify research issues and highlight a future scientific agenda regarding common approaches to behavioral aspects of primary medical care practice. Background: To achieve optimal health outcomes, primary care providers (PCPs) must engage their patients around decisions and behaviors that may enhance or harm their daily well-being and long-term health outcomes. Patients vary greatly in their treatment preferences and capacity to engage in health-promoting behaviors and disease self-management activities. A variety of factors can compromise this capacity further, including mental health disorders, tobacco, heavy drinking, and/or substance use disorders. In order to effectively diagnose, treat and manage behavioral health and other chronic medical diseases it is important for PCPs to recognize these behavioral health issues when they present and understand how these conditions interact with patients’ other medical disorders (and vice et versa), as well as the benefit of an integrated treatment approach. PCPs treat a wide range of behavioral disorders and chronic medical conditions, with each patient frequently presenting with multiple conditions. For example, one such “complex patent” may need treatment for tobacco addiction, chronic depression, diabetes, chronic obstructive lung disease, and coronary artery disease. Thus, PCPs often grapple with specific medical strategies for managing chronic physical conditions, identifying and treating behavioral health disorders and general treatment adherence, all in the same patient. Is there a common approach that would facilitate PCPs provision of high-quality care; that is, care that integrates behavioral and general medical care, for a broad range of health conditions and lead to measurably improved health outcomes? If so, what research would promote the identification and evaluation of such an approach?
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