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.

Nancy Ruddy, PhD, currently serves as an internal program quality and accreditation consultant to graduate medical training programs at Stanford Healthcare in Palo Alto, CA. Over the last 30 years, she has served in various roles in training both medical and mental health professionals to provide integrated behavioral health including medical residency faculty, psychology postdoctoral fellowship director, postgraduate training program faculty, and curriculum design expert. Dr. Ruddy is a licensed psychologist and medical family therapist, having obtained both clinical member and approved supervisor status in the American Association of Marriage and Family Therapy. Dr. Ruddy has served as the chair of the Integrated Primary Care Group in The Society for Health Psychology and is currently the past president of the Society as a whole. Dr. Ruddy was recognized for her contributions to the field of health psychology with the Timothy B. Jeffrey Memorial Award for Outstanding Contributions to Clinical Health Psychology in 2013. In addition, Dr. Ruddy has consulted to dozens of health care systems to facilitate the integration of behavioral health services into medical settings. Dr. Ruddy has published numerous book chapters and articles on integrated health care, as well as the 2008 APA book, The Collaborative Psychotherapist: Creating Reciprocal Relationships with Medical Professionals.
 
Susan H. McDaniel, PhD, ABPP, is the Dr. Laurie Sands distinguished professor of Families & Health and vice chair of the Department of Family Medicine at the University of Rochester Medical Center (URMC); in the Department of Psychiatry, she is the director of the Institute for the Family and the academic chief of the Division of Collaborative Care & Wellness. She is also director of the URMC Physician Communication Coaching Program. Dr. McDaniel's career is dedicated to integrating psychological and relational science and practice into health care. She has won many awards and is the author of well over 100 journal articles and 17 books, translated into 10 languages, including 5 by APA, including Medical Family Therapy and Integrated Care, Family Therapy, Primary Care Psychology, Integrating Family Therapy, and A Casebook for Integrating Family Therapy, as well as 2 special issues of the American Psychologist on psychology and primary care, and the science of teamwork. Dr. McDaniel served as coeditor, with Thomas Campbell, MD, of the Families, Systems & Health journal for 12 years, and as associate editor for the American Psychologist for 10 years. She is a frequent speaker at national and international medical and mental health meetings. Dr. McDaniel has served in many leadership positions in mental health and primary care. She was the 2016 president of the American Psychological Association.