Strengthening Public Health Through Primary Care and Public Health Collaboration: Innovative State Approaches.

Objective: Partnerships are increasingly critical to achieve the mission of public health. We sought to understand the levers and tools that states use to better connect public health and primary care in efforts to strengthen public health.

Design: We reviewed literature focused on collaborative or integrative efforts between primary care and public health and examined strategies employed by 4 innovative states: North Carolina, Oregon, Rhode Island, and Washington.

Implementing the Collaborative Care Model as Part of a Countywide Initiative.

This column describes the planning and implementation of an integrated behavioral health project which was facilitated and endorsed by a developing accountable health community, the Washtenaw Health Initiative (WHI). The WHI is a voluntary countywide coalition of academic, community, health system, and county government agencies dedicated to improving access to high-quality health care for low-income, uninsured, and Medicaid populations. When lack of access to mental health services was identified as a pressing concern, the WHI endorsed pilot testing of collaborative care, an evidence-based treatment model, in county safety-net clinics.

Primary care capacity as insurance coverage expands: examining the role of health information technology.

Objectives: Under the Affordable Care Act, many newly insured Americans have the challenge of establishing care with a primary care physician (PCP). We sought to examine whether health information technology (HIT) use in primary care practices was associated with anticipated capacity to accept new patients.

Study Design: Secondary analysis of a cross-sectional survey of Michigan PCPs from the specialties of pediatrics, internal medicine, and family medicine, conducted from October to December 2012.

How a regional collaborative of hospitals and physicians in Michigan cut costs and improved the quality of care.

There is evidence that collaborations between hospitals and physicians in particular regions of the country have led to improvements in the quality of care. Even so, there have not been many of these collaborations. We review one, the Michigan regional collaborative improvement program, which was paid for by a large private insurer, has yielded improvements for a range of clinical conditions, and has reduced costs in several important areas.