If you’re the caretaker of a loved one with dementia, you’re probably familiar with taking them to a number of different medical specialists who help treat physical ailments like arthritis or back pain.
But while these types of chronic disorders are commonly co-occurring with dementia, mental health conditions are just as prominent. From depression to anxiety, sleeping disorders to schizophrenia, your loved one’s mental health is just as important as their physical wellbeing.
Getting access to the right mental healthcare can be challenging. The collaborative care model seeks to address this inconsistency by bridging the gap between physical health and behavioral health. Here’s how it works and how it can benefit you and your loved one.
What Is Collaborative Care?
The collaborative care model is essentially a way for mental health providers to work with primary care physicians, or PCPs, to offer integrated care for patients who are not reaching their clinical goals.
This model is led by the PCP, who then works with licensed mental and behavioral health professionals to address your loved one’s clinical needs. The goal is to address both the external and internal factors that might be preventing your loved one from an enhanced quality of life.
Let’s say your loved one has a knee injury from a fall. They’ll likely visit their primary care provider, a physical therapist, or maybe an orthopedic specialist in order to improve their joint function. However, their inability to move their legs during their recovery period might also cause them to feel down or discouraged.
Primary care physicians are often the first resource that individuals use for mental health care, though PCPs often lack the extensive mental health knowledge that psychologists or psychiatrists can provide.
For that reason, the collaborative care model utilizes psychologists and psychiatrists in addition to their physical health specialists to tackle both the behavioral and physical effects of their injury.
In most cases, a behavioral health manager works in the same setting as the primary care physician. This care manager works directly with a consulting psychiatrist who can provide treatment options for your loved one to help them meet their goals.
Together, psychiatrists can recommend therapy or medications that can then confidently be prescribed by the PCP to help your loved one feel as good as they ever have.
Components of the Collaborative Care Model
There are five main aspects of the collaborative care model that are deployed to ensure an individual’s success. As your loved one begins the process of collaborative care with their PCP, these are the essential elements that ensure success.
- Patient-Centered Team Care: Your loved one exists at the forefront of care throughout the entire process. Your PCP as well as your family member’s mental health provider will craft detailed plans and goals together to ensure that every individual throughout the process is on the same page. This not only enhances success, but it also allows your loved one to have more interactions with their providers to allow them to become more comfortable.
- Measurement-Based Treatments: Your loved one will have clearly articulated and actionable goals throughout their treatment process. Treatments are actively changed in coordination with all providers if your loved one is not easily reaching certain milestones.
- Population-Based Care: A clinical care team shares a defined group of patients only. This makes sure that every patient receives the care they need and that nobody falls through the cracks. It also allows providers to develop more in-depth relationships with their patients to increase comfort and success.
- Evidence-Based Care: Your loved one will receive treatment practices that are backed with credible research-based or clinical evidence.
- Accountable Care: Within the collaborative care model, providers are compensated for the quality of care and the outcomes of their clinical work – not just the care they provide.
When these five elements are in place, your loved one can have a much better chance of success.
Collaborative Care vs. Care Coordination
As you and your loved one journey through their healthcare goals, you may hear the terms collaborative care and care coordination used often. While these sound like similar phrases, there are some key differences to understand.
Care coordination is essentially the foundational layer of collaborative care.
→ Care coordination involves collaboration and communication between physical professionals, behavioral health professionals, and other members of the allied healthcare continuum.
However, these providers work independently from one another in their own separate practices.
→ Collaborative care (also called integrated care) is a form of care coordination at the highest level in which members of the team often work alongside one another in the same facility.
This model is especially common within assisted living or long-term care facilities.
Benefits of the Collaborative Care Model
There are many reasons why the collaborative care model has continued to become more popular with time. But the main reason is that it can completely enhance your loved one’s quality of life.
Bridges Gaps in Communication
While the healthcare system is thorough and well-equipped to address your loved one’s unique challenges, it’s also extremely complex.
And considering that your loved one will likely be visiting multiple specialists at any given time, it can be frustrating when providers are not on the same page about your family member’s course of treatment.
Collaborative care is designed so that PCPs and other healthcare professionals communicate with one another to achieve a greater likelihood in of success for your loved one.
This not only makes it easier for professionals to prescribe proper treatment methods, but it also makes it easier on your end since you won’t be solely responsible for consistently keeping your loved one’s providers up to date on changes or alterations to your loved one’s overall treatment plan and medical history.
Minimizes Readmission Rates
The main purpose of your loved one receiving medical care in the first place is so that they can reduce their risk of needing to go back to the hospital. The good news is that the collaborative care model has demonstrated that it effectively reduces admission rates when compared to primary care alone.
With multiple specialists taking care of your loved one at any given moment, the chances of misdiagnoses drop. Misdiagnosis, and therefore improper treatment, is one of the main reasons why individuals must be readmitted into a hospital setting.
Better Patient Outcomes
Taking a unilateral approach to chronic disease treatment has the benefit of providing your loved one with accurate and timely care. However, when specialists only focus on one aspect of care, they fail to see the bigger picture.
Collaborative care ensures that your loved one receives treatment and care from all angles.
And since behavioral health and physical wellbeing often go hand in hand, the end result is a better quality of life and a more holistic treatment experience.
Fights Back Against Mental Health Stigma
Another powerful benefit of the collaborative care model is that it can de-stigmatize mental health disorders and treatment. Depression and anxiety affect many older adults, especially those with co-occurring diseases like dementia. However, it’s not a normal part of aging.
With that said, many people feel that mental health conditions are just signs of frailty or moral failure. This means that there are many people who need mental healthcare but just don’t feel confident or secure enough to actually seek it for themselves.
The collaborative care model can close this gap by integrating both physical and behavioral care together into your loved one’s treatment plan.
This can not only make it more accessible for your family member to receive treatment from a psychologist or psychiatrist, but it also can help them address mental health issues before they become overwhelming.
Saves Money
The collaborative care model can help you and your loved one save money in more ways than one. Perhaps the most pronounced money-saver is that it is often reimbursable by insurance, meaning that most medications and talk therapy prescriptions can often be covered by your loved one’s provider.
But on top of that, since it can often reduce readmission into a clinical setting, you can save money on potentially preventable illnesses that might occur later on without proper treatment. And it can even help save on travel expenses since you won’t need to drive (or hire someone to drive) your family member back and forth to multiple providers.
Effectiveness of the Collaborative Care Model
The collaborative care model has been widely studied and researched, and one of the main reasons it is increasing in popularity as a medical practice is its efficacy.
One study that looked at the effectiveness of integrated care among homeless populations with mental illness found that it had a successful impact on their clinical outcome.
Another analysis of nine mental health facilities found that using the collaborative care model led to improved health status of patients as well as a decrease in re-hospitalization.
How To Use the Collaborative Care Model
The model of integrated care is being adopted in many different healthcare facilities, and more and more assisted living facilities are beginning to utilize it. More often than not, if you enroll your loved one into one of these long-term facilities, they are already using collaborative care to cover all of the bases of your loved one’s treatment.
With that said, if coordinated care is something that your loved one’s facility lacks, Lightyear Health is committed to bridging the gap. Our collaborative and coordinated care team can act as a middleman to ensure that your loved one’s health providers are all on the same page.
Not only does this enhance their level of care, but it also removes some of the stress on your end as the caregiver, since this task will no longer fall on your shoulders.
The Takeaways
- The collaborative care model makes it easier for individuals to receive quality mental health treatment through integrated care from all of their medical providers. Primary care physicians act as the first resource, working with a behavioral care manager and psychiatrist to ensure that your loved one receives care from all angles.
- The collaborative care model takes a client-centered approach that focuses on your loved one’s unique physical and mental health challenges to provide a holistic treatment that enhances their quality of life.
- Not only can it bridge communication gaps, but it can cut down on readmission rates and it can save money in the long term.
While many health facilities across the country are already practicing the collaborative care model, you can kickstart the process at your loved one’s facility with Lightyear Health’s collaborative care program.
We’ll work with you and your family member to ensure that all of their providers are on the same page – leading to better clinical outcomes for the people you love most.
Get in touch to learn more about what we can do to redefine the aging process.
Sources:
Collaborative Care | University of Washington AIMS Center
