Robert Axelrod, MD has recently been appointed to a new role in his organization in which he shares responsibility for the development of a comprehensive strategy for Behavioral Health throughout PeaceHealth including in inpatient hospitals, psychiatric clinics, and all outpatient settings including primary care and urgent care.
After a fifteen year career as a clinical psychiatrist and Medical Director in Longview, Dr. Axelrod is looking forward to this new challenge, but “it’s obvious that the old way of delivering psychiatric care – hiring a bunch of psychiatrists and therapists and referring everyone from primary care – isn’t going to work. The shortage of psychiatrists isn’t going away and it’s impractical to refer the 1 in 4 primary care patients with an active mental health disorder.”
Dr. Axelrod believes Collaborative and Integrated Care hold the key to solving the supply/demand imbalance. According to Dr. Axelrod, it’s not obvious how to fund these initiatives though CMS’s support of CoCM is promising. In addition it can be hard to persuade clinicians to adopt this model if they are used to working ‘the old way’ – and yet moving incrementally takes too long to solve today’s urgent patient care needs.
Dr. Axelrod is hoping to learn from this fellowship program about the different models of Integrated and Collaborative care which exist, what resources are available to help develop and implement a community-specific program, how to anticipate and solve barriers to implementation, and how to sustainably fund these initiatives. He would also like to learn about to measure and demonstrate success or failure with these programs.