APA’s Free Collaborative Care Training to Continue in New York

Free in-person training in the Collaborative Care Model (CoCM) will be offered again at this year’s Annual Meeting.

The session “Applying the Integrated Care Approach: Collaborative Care Skills for the Consulting Psychiatrist” will be held at three times: Saturday, May 5, 8 a.m. to 12 p.m.; Sunday, May 6, 12:30 p.m. to 4:30 p.m.; and Monday, May 7, 1 p.m. to 5 p.m. Seats in each session are available on a first-come, first-served basis.

This year, there will also be an advanced session, scheduled for Tuesday, May 8, 1 p.m. to 5 p.m. The advanced session is also free and open to all meeting attendees.

All training workshops are part of the Transforming Clinical Practice Initiative (TCPI), a $2.9 million, four-year federal grant from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. APA is one of just 39 organizations chosen to participate in TCPI. As one of the Support and Alignment Networks (SANs) awarded under the grant, APA is committed to training 3,500 psychiatrists in the principles and practice of collaborative care, a specific model of integrated care developed by the late Wayne Katon, M.D., Jürgen Unützer, M.D., M.P.H., and colleagues at the AIMS (Advancing Integrated Mental Health Solutions) Center at the University of Washington.

The standard workshop, offered Saturday through Monday, will make the case for integrated behavioral health services in primary care, including the evidence for its effectiveness; discuss principles of integrated behavioral health care; describe the roles for a primary care consulting psychiatrist on an integrated care team; and apply a primary care–oriented approach to psychiatric consultation for common behavioral health presentations.

The session will also educate psychiatrists on how to engage in TCPI and connect with regional primary care networks that are recruiting psychiatrists with integrated care training.

Co-coordinators of the training are Anna Ratzliff, M.D., M.P.H., and John Kern, M.D., both at the University of Washington.

Since APA has been offering the training, many psychiatrists trained in the model have gone on to be involved in suc cessful implementations of CoCM, and many more are preparing to do so. So far there have been 12 completed SAN learning collaboratives, an advanced online training activity.

For psychiatrists already versed in the fundamentals of collaborative care, the advanced training session on Tuesday will delve into a number of areas crucial to the successful implementation of CoCM programs.

“Since the APA/AIMS Center SAN project has now trained over 2,000 psychiatrists, and over 150 psychiatrists have participated in the follow-up learning collaborative, we felt that there was a demand for more detailed and focused training for psychiatrists actually implementing collaborative care programs in their communities,” Kern told Psychiatric News.

The advanced session includes the following:

• Nuts-and-bolts details about how successful implementations have overcome common obstacles.

• An up-to-date report on collaborative care billing codes and procedures.

• A thorough introduction to the APA/AIMS Center Financial Modeling Tool, which has been assisting organizations with making credible financial plans for collaborative care implementation.

• A review of the use of data gleaned from a collaborative care registry and a presentation on how to meaningfully evaluate these data for purposes of program improvement.

• A review of techniques and strategies for efficiently training members of the collaborative care team, including care managers and primary care providers. 

“Because we are mindful of the importance to psychiatrists of the development of a community of collaborative care practitioners, there will be opportunities for participants to engage with panel members and reflect on the diverse, real-life experiences of building and implementing a collaborative care program,” Kern said. ■