October 3, 2024- The head and the body are one connected system and should be treated as such, said Diane Powers, MA, MBA. “We know from many research studies that behavioral health conditions worsen medical conditions and vice versa,” she said. “It makes sense to treat them together.”
That is one of the chief goals of the AIMS Center, of which Powers is Co-Director. The AIMS Center was created 20 years ago to help healthcare organizations, clinicians, payers, and policymakers implement the Collaborative Care Model (CoCM) – a method of integrating behavioral health services into primary care and other medical settings using the principles of the chronic care model. Specifically, it is a patient-centered and population health approach that uses measurement-based treatment to target and evidence-based interventions to achieve significantly better patient outcomes as compared with usual care.
CoCM adds a behavioral health care manager and a psychiatric consultant to the primary care or medical team. They use a population health registry to support their work. CoCM has been proven in over 90 research studies worldwide to get more patients better faster than other approaches, even when usual care includes a co-located therapist in the primary care clinic.
“The AIMS Center has worked with hundreds of healthcare organizations and trained more than a thousand clinicians over the past 20 years and through that process we have learned quite a bit about what it takes to implement a healthcare innovation like CoCM, both what to do and what not to do,” Powers said. “We provide many resources on our website and we also provide implementation coaching, clinical training, a population health registry, and evaluation support. The AIMS Center continues to conduct research on CoCM and recent investigations include using CoCM for co-occurring opioid use disorder and mental health conditions and using text messaging as an adjunct to treatment.”
Read more in the latest issue of Repertoire Magazine.