Advancing Collaborative Mental Health Care in Primary Care Settings

A National Quality Framework with Recommended Measures

Collaborative mental health care is a proven approach for improving:

• timely access to evidence-informed care
• individual health outcomes
• patients’ experience of care
• fairness in health-care delivery
• equitable outcomes across populations
• the cost-effectiveness of care.

Yet collaborative care varies significantly across the country and can also depart from empirically supported models.

This revised framework outlined in this report is designed to assist in organizing and delivering primary care mental health and addictions services. It seeks to help:

• planners and leaders in practice and policy reach a shared understanding of the quality dimensions in collaborative care services
• highlight the supports and structures needed for their successful implementation
• identify measures for key quality targets to implement effective collaborative care
• support quality measurement and improvement initiatives
• facilitate new practice-based evidence on collaborative care, including research on comparative effectiveness.