AIMS Center faculty members John Fortney, PhD, and Amy Bauer, MD, MS, will lead a three-year, multi-state project to facilitate mental health care for patients with complex psychiatric disorders in primary care settings. Funded by the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute (PCORI), the project will leverage and scale a Telepsychiatry Collaborative Care Model to help identify and treat patients with bipolar disorder and/or post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

Telepsychiatry Collaborative Care is an evidence-based model in which an integrated primary care team, including a care manager and telepsychiatrist consultant, collaboratively identify and treat patients with behavioral health conditions in primary care settings. Dr. Fortney and Dr. Unutzer’s previous PCORI-funded study (Comparing Two Telehealth Approaches for Treating Complex Psychiatric Disorders in Primary Care — The SPIRIT Study) demonstrated that telepsychiatry collaborative care significantly and substantially improved clinical outcomes for patients with bipolar disorder and PTSD living in medically underserved areas.

The AIMS Center, in partnership with Concert Health, will use a train-the-trainer implementation strategy to support a rollout of Telepsychiatry Collaborative Care for PTSD and bipolar disorder to 2,500 or more patients. The patients will receive care from at least 60 primary care clinics geographically located in medically underserved areas or caring for medically underserved populations.