Behavioral Health and Primary Care Integration

This document summarizes an initiative that convened major Massachusetts stakeholders to identify collaborative efforts that would advance adoption of behavioral health integration in primary care in the Commonwealth. The initiative surfaced experience-based insights about the challenges of advancing behavioral health and primary care integration (BH integration) across industry sectors. It also produced two potential solutions to these challenges. While the project participants supported the advancement behavioral health integration, they did not achieve consensus to pursue a collective pilot and test the solutions identified. Nevertheless, based on participants’ exchanges in this project, informed by existing research, the authors believe that there are opportunities for collaborative work to advance access to effective behavioral health care and, as an initial step, urge participants to share and discuss this report within their respective organizations.