Starting this past November, our Psychiatric Consultation and Telepsychiatry Program (PCAT) led by Marc Avery, MD, and Denise Chang, MD, began a systematic quality improvement project to improve the depression treatment and outcomes for patients receiving care within the UW Medicine primary care network, and who are members of an identified UW Medicine Accountable Care Network contract. The project is initially focusing on Boeing ACO Contract members, but will eventually include PEBB and Premera Blue Cross contract members. Goals of the Depression Path Project include:

• Improving the oversight of depression treatments for depressed patients receiving primary care at UW Medicine.
• Improving identification of patients who are not improving as expected and engaging in appropriate levels of care.
• Improving the tracking of patient depression treatment outcomes.
• Increasing the use of evidence-based practices in depressed patients.
• Improving Health Care Teams’ and Patient Experience of Care.
• Identifying opportunities for improving depression care and achieving optimal clinical outcomes for primary care patients within UW Medicine program.

The project is overseen by David R Flum, MD, MPH and D.C. Dugdale, MD, FACP, with assistance from Van Chaudhari, FACHE, and Jason Chu. Simultaneously, UW Medicine is engaged in a system-wide Primary Care Innovations (PCI) Initiative A number of the PCI workgroups address key elements in the improvement of depression treatment across the network – representing a stepped-strategy approach to improving depression care across the entire network.