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Abstract

Primary care patients often present with mental and behavioral health concerns, such as depression or insomnia, leaving medical teams scrambling. To help fill this gap and increase access to care while aligning with patient preferences, a new service delivery model of integrated care, characterized by embedding behavioral health providers within medical teams, was embraced in a grassroots effort, with the VA being one of the first healthcare systems to implement it throughout all primary care settings. A common challenge to grassroot efforts is the lack of research establishing effectiveness and identifying ways to optimize the innovation’s impact. Innovative VA leaders and Congress recognized integrated care’s promise but also realized the importance of and need for research, training, and implementation support to optimize its success resulting in the creation of the VA Center for Integrated Healthcare (CIH) in 2004. To assist in overcoming the known lengthy timeline of translating research into practice and vice versa, CIH integrated research with training and implementation support through a purposeful and highly collaborative approach impacting both the CIH structure and processes, which contributed to a high level of productivity over the past 20 years helping to optimize evidence-based mental and behavioral health care for Veterans. This article will describe CIH’s successes in bringing evidence-based integrated care practices to over 450,000 Veterans annually and how this novel approach contributed. Exemplars are provided on how internal synergies created more empirical evidence for integrated care and greater utilization of evidence-based practices within integrated care settings.

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