A medical home that provides conventional primary care with a focus on mental health appears to be an effective model for managing patients with serious psychiatric illnesses, new research has found.
Patients with serious mental illnesses such as schizophrenia and bipolar disorder die at rates 2.2 times higher than the general population. But people with these conditions — who often also experience cognitive deficits, have impaired social skills, are socially disadvantaged, and have high rates of substance addiction — are less likely to receive primary care services and instead rely heavily on hospitals and emergency departments for their medical care.
Clinicians at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), and their colleagues sought to reverse these poor outcomes by addressing mental health problems at the primary care level.
They created a patient-centered medical home, a care model designed to ensure that patients receive primary and mental health care on a continuous basis to better manage chronic conditions and maintain wellness, rather than during separate, periodic visits to a doctor's office.
Dr Alex Young
"Few psychiatrists are trained in primary care or can provide these services. The same is true for primary care physicians, and we need to be able to better coordinate care for these vulnerable patients," said Alex Young, MD, lead author of the new study and director of the Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA.
