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Behavioral Health Integration:
Stepping Stones, Lessons Learned and Implementation

Program Overview

Behavioral health needs are presented in a majority of primary care visits. Seamlessly integrating behavioral health in primary care teams meets customer needs, reduces no-show rates and assists providers with complicated cases. In this session discover various models for integrating behavioral health and learn Southcentral Foundation’s steps for fully integrating behavioral health, including reorientation for primary care teams and new roles and processes.

  • Southcentral Foundation Nuka System of Care overview and approach to behavioral health integration
  • Lessons learned on the journey to full integration: steps, tools and pitfalls

More and more health systems are adapting team-based care as their health care delivery model. At Southcentral Foundation, we successfully deliver this model every day through our integrated care teams. Preparing primary care providers and behaviorists to work collaboratively requires new roles, steps and screening tools. In this session, speakers will demonstrate both the common scenarios encountered in clinics every day and the communication tools used to make behavioral health integration successful. Changes in roles and processes can be difficult; also in this session, learn best practices to facilitate change across your organization.

  • Demonstration: primary care provider and behaviorist warm hand-off
  • Behavioral health leadership structure and overview
  • Tools to facilitate change across the organization while balancing the needs of patients (knows as customer-owners) and employees

LEARNING OBJECTIVES

  • Compare the differences between traditional health care systems and integrated health care systems
  • Outline the clinical and operational processes needed for successful integration of behavioral health into primary care
  • Identify goals for behavioral health integration in the participants’ organizations/institutions and develop a plan for integration
  • Connect and collaborate with co-participants in the webinar
  • Communicate and connect with presenters and consultants for further application of the information in specific clinical settings and share these experiences with others

ADDITIONAL RESOURCES

Purchasing the two-part series also includes the following resources:

  • Presentation decks
  • Sample job descriptions for behavioral health consultants and senior behavioral health consultants
  • Link to a video tour of Southcentral Foundation’s Anchorage Native Primary Care Center

$250

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Speakers & Biographies

Melissa Merrick, LCSW, MSW, CDCI, Clinical Director of Brief Intervention Services

Melissa K. Merrick is a licensed clinical social worker and clinical director for Southcentral Foundation. Melissa joined SCF in 2007. She helps to oversee quality and clinical improvement for SCF’s Behavioral Services Division. She coordinates quality assurance activities and program development and provides clinical oversight for the behavioral health integration program. She directs clinical activities for behavioral health consultants who provide services in four clinics across multiple disciplines. She has been instrumental in designing and implementing new programs in the clinics, such as the Suboxone program in primary care, chronic pain management and opiate prescribing and expanding co-located psychiatry in the primary care clinics.

Tamara Pickett, MD, Medical Director

Tamara “Tammy” Pickett has served in a number of different capacities at SCF since 2001, from physician mentor to medical director in 1 West clinic. She is a two-time cancer survivor and has a passion for partnering wellness with lifestyle changes. She is a customer-owner of Inupiaq descent. She attended the University of Washington Medical School and completed her family practice residency at Providence Alaska Medical Center in Anchorage, Alaska.  She has received awards from the Physician Practice Connections Recognition Program and the Patient-Centered Medical Home Recognition Program, both from the National Committee for Quality Assurance. In addition to her duties in clinic, Pickett presents on relationship-based care and other aspects of SCF’s Nuka System of Care.

Sarah Switzer, LCSW, CDCI, Clinical Supervisor

Sarah Switzer is a licensed clinical social worker who began her work in Alaska after college, as an AmeriCorps*VISTA volunteer with the State domestic violence network in Sitka. She worked for SEARHC’s youth adventure-based substance abuse treatment program for two years before attending graduate school at the University of Maryland, interning at Hopkin’s Center for Addiction and Pregnancy. Sarah is an SCF Behavioral Health Consultant Clinical Supervisor in the Primary Care Clinics. She has worked in the primary care clinics as a part of integrated behavioral health for 11 years. She is passionate about her family, integration, maternal child health and building on strengths and resiliency to motivate health behavior change.