AHRQ Integration Academy – A Resource on Behavioral Health Integration

Context Behavioral health integration (BHI) has been encouraged for years as a way to improve care for mental health and substance use disorders, as well as contributing to the care of acute and chronic physical health conditions in primary care settings. It has been slow to be implemented. The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) created the Academy for Integrating Behavioral Health and Primary Care (the Academy) in 2011 to respond to the recognized need for a national resource and coordinating center for those interested in behavioral health and primary care integration. A website was launched in 2012 with the goal of providing a set of resources that would define the field of BHI and provide guidance to those working on implementation. As behavioral health integration became more common, so did the demand to collect, analyze, synthesize, and issue actionable information that providers, policymakers, investigators, and consumers can readily use and apply. This poster will describe some of the newer resources being developed for the Academy.

Objective to share the resources of the AHRQ Integration Academy with NAPCRG members and to stimulate ideas for research related to the implementation of BHI in primary care.

Study Design and Analysis this poster will describe the resources developed by the Integration Academy, including a consensus definition of BHI, playbooks to guide implementation of BHI and of Medication Assisted Treatment for Opioid Use Disorder in primary care, and a number of topic briefs.

Outcome Measures we will provide utilization metrics and other website related metrics to describe how the resources of the Academy have been used over time.

Results From April 2022 to May 2023, the site had more than 43,000 users who engaged in approximately 55,000 sessions and viewed more than 100,000 pages of content. During this period, users visited more than 14,000 external resources linked from the site and downloaded more than 6500 files. Other metrics will be available for the poster.

Conclusions the Academy website provides a useful set of resources for people working on implementation of BHI in their settings.