Mindful Continuing Education

1. The organizational mission of serving patients with optimal integrated care involves applying a team approach, working to improve the integrated care model, and:

2. Collaborative practices among clinicians, regardless of discipline, are important to integrating care, and these may include pooling expertise, remaining accessible to other professionals, articulation of roles, and acting on the organization’s shared values.

3. Empirical evidence suggests that while the U.S. health care system continues to provide inadequate coverage to consumers and falls short in preventive and chronic disease care, behavioral health integration, also known as collaborative or integrated care, leads to improved care and reduced costs.

4. When analyzing data pertaining to integrated behavioral and primary health care, the expert panel relied on a predicated theory approach that used predetermined codes to tag relevant data sources and findings.

5. Characteristics of learning organizations that support integrated care include each of the following EXCEPT:

6. In integrated care settings, competent leaders are aware of barriers to care for patients and they advocate to eliminate those barriers.

7. When building and sustaining integrated care delivery teams, organizations define expertise, address gaps as needed, build strong teams that fulfill mission and vision, and collect information to enhance patience experience.

8. Full-time behavioral health clinician (BHC) staff presence is often required in order to:

9. During staff training and development, orientation-related practices include providing written policies and procedures, sharing stories to solidify and communicate the mission, and:

10. Once clear roles and responsibilities are established within an organization, staff members should not be asked to work outside their defined roles, as this can create organizational inconsistency and patient discomfort.

11. When developing protocols, organizations should place a value on certain routinized clinical processes by setting clear goals and providing feedback on goal attainment, and by providing assistance in achieving goals when needed.

12. Maximizing physical work space for integrated care includes each of the following EXCEPT:

13. Which of the following is NOT one of the recommended features to support the delivery of population-based integrated care?

14. Experts recommend that professionals follow integration-based workflows that allow for internal and external referrals for behavioral health, primary care, and other services.

15. Inter-professional collaboration involves acknowledging and integrating expertise, and it includes acting on input from others, sharing decision-making, and:

16. Best practice suggests that integrated care is more efficiently executed when clinicians agree on a single communication mode, such as secure email, phone contact, or web-based portals.

17. Professional practices related to engaging individuals, couples, and families in care include destigmatazion of care, rapid and accurate assessment, agenda setting, and patient education.

18. A practice can be defined as a learning organization if it uses clinical and patient feedback to make improvements and if it creates a culture where people are willing to lead, accept criticism, and adapt to change.

19. Accountability in a learning organization is observed when leadership holds staff and the organization responsible for achieving identified performance goals, and has the capacity to discuss these standards.

20. Consistent documentation that informs the quality improvement targets and monitors the quality improvement process for integrated care includes each of the following EXCEPT:

21. Strategies to manage finances in order to support the organization’s mission and vision for integrated care include negotiating with external financial stakeholders, managing internal finances by offsetting costs, administering existing payment structures, and finding money saving opportunities.

22. Among exemplary organizations, leaders at all levels determined the level of expertise and depth of staffing needed to deliver care, and the goal of all these organizations was:

23. For successful integrated care organizations, training is the process where formal education sessions are offered to new employees so they may learn about the history, vision, mission, and culture of the organization, and may receive information about a range of procedural tasks.

24. In integrated health organizations, a formal, ongoing mentoring infrastructure allows peers to learn from each other and from more experienced professionals.

25. As organizations work to create structure to support the delivery of integrated care, they often work to strike a balance between clear roles and responsibility protocols, and:

26. In order to determine who is responsible for patient care and clinical care, it is critical to define what “patient in crisis” means, and how differing types of patient behavioral health illness and severity should be handled.

27. Sequential tasks in the work environment are those that need input and materials from others in the clinic to be accomplished and require back-and-forth communication and mutual adjustment.

28. Which of the following is NOT one of the desired strategies when developing meeting structures on integrated care?

29. Physical layout can promote or inhibit communication and relationship development among staff and clinicians in an integrated care system and can influence patient access and follow-through as a result of the need to travel from one place to another.

30. Whenever possible, clinic leaders should incorporate other services into their care space, such as community and public health organizations.

31. The expert panel recommends hiring outside professionals with specialized knowledge to customize electronic health record (EHR) systems for behavioral health.

32. An important aspect of integrated care is being able to document information in a manner that is accessible, actionable by clinicians from other disciplines on the care team, and:

33. The two factors that determine what type of communication should be used with patients in integrated care include the urgency of the patient’s situation and:

34. In most integrated care situations, clinical supervision is considered to be an organizational or administrative function rather than a key aspect of care structure and delivery.

35. Patient visit summaries should include clear and concise information about a patient’s situation so that another person in the practice can use the information as needed, and each summary must include enough information to allow other providers to rapidly assess the acuity of patient need.

36. Examples of communications used during collaboration include input from various experts, clinical and non-clinical assessment of patients, debriefing about patient encounters, and communication about patient conflicts, peer support, and:

37. According to the authors, clinicians must be careful when discussing sensitive or stigmatized issues, particularly those related to behavioral health and substance use, and must communicate in a manner that is:

38. Clinicians should strive to normalize and destigmatize treatment when necessary by presenting integrated services as part of discrete and specialized care.

39. When patients present with multiple and complex needs, clinicians should immediately coordinate with the behavioral health team to determine priorities for care.

40. Professional practices related to group visits within integrated care include each of the following EXCEPT:

41. Behavioral health care clinicians can support patients who are waiting for access to specialty mental health services by reinforcing the patient’s understanding that specialty mental health care is the appropriate path and recognizing that their role is to provide interim support.

42. As integrated behavioral health and primary care evolve, areas for exploration will include examining how communication among professionals and patients differs in integrated and non-integrated settings, how professional practices are connected to clinical outcomes, and how these practices can be best implemented.