A Systemic Approach to Behavioral Healthcare Integration: Context Matters

This book provides clinicians, consultants, and healthcare administrators with a roadmap to establishing a systemic, patient-centered, family-oriented behavioral health service that is integrated into a healthcare setting. Healthcare that goes beyond biomedical issues to address our whole biopsychosocial selves, produces better outcomes for patients and families. Integrating behavioral health into medical settings requires an understanding of the interplay of multiple systemic layers in American healthcare. The existing literature on integration largely fails to address the "big picture" of integrated services and systems, including operations, clinical processes, and financial sustainability elements. A Systemic Approach to Behavioral Healthcare Integration summarizes the literature on the impact of integrating behavioral health care into medical settings, on the role of families in health maintenance and chronic disease management, and on team science and applying family systems theory/relational science to the teams that are now essential to healthcare.