ACP Calls for Behavioral Health Integration

Addressing behavioral health issues in the primary care setting makes sense, and it's time for stakeholders to address and eliminate barriers to integrating mental health and physical health for the sake of patients, the American College of Physicians (ACP) proposed.

Though not terribly specific in terms of practical implementation, the ACP's Health and Public Policy Committee outlined six broad recommendations to bring behavioral health management into the "whole person" approach of primary care medicine, which they published in the Annals of Internal Medicine.

"Mental and substance use disorders alone have been estimated to surpass all physical diseases as a major cause of disability worldwide by 2020," the authors wrote. "Recently, there has been a call for the use of the primary care delivery platform and the related patient-centered medical home model to effectively address these conditions."