Addressing Co-occurring Disorders in Your CoCM Patients
Although collaborative care is associated with mental health, your CoCM care manager is not limited to supporting mental health issues with your patients.
This whole person approach yields better patient engagement, more robust clinical outcomes, reduces liability, and increases provider efficiency.
There’s a crucial intersection between mental health and medical conditions. Further, the relationship between the two is bidirectional – with symptoms heavily influenced by social determinants. This nuanced intersection makes it challenging to effectively diagnose and address the needs of patients with comorbidities.
The good news? The collaborative care model (CoCM) is uniquely designed to support primary care providers in navigating this complexity. CoCM stands out for its interdisciplinary approach to care and emphasis on data-driven decision-making, making it well-suited to address the needs of patients with multi-faceted conditions.
CoCM equips providers with real-time behavioral health data, facilitating accurate diagnosis and comprehensive symptom monitoring over time. Moreover, providers can collaborate closely with the psychiatric consultant on their team to support diagnosis and tailored care plans for patients with complex needs.
The intersection between behavioral health and physical health is indisputably and inextricably linked.
Note that the relationships of conditions shown below is for illustrative purposes only of some of the more commonly seen mental and physical health comorbidities. There are many more interrelated diagnoses than shown here.
Patients with co-occurring mental and physical health conditions can be challenging to diagnose and treat. Here’s what you can do.
Screen patients with physical health conditions for comorbid mental health conditions
Evaluate patients with mental health presentations to identify any possible underlying physical health conditions or contributing factors
Refer patients with comorbid mental health and physical health conditions to CoCM
Use universal screening for behavioral health symptoms and SDOH factors alongside physical health data to enable holistic assessment and management of patients
Educate patients about the interactions between physical health, behavioral health, and social factors
