AIMS Center (University of Washington)

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Overview

Advancing integrated mental health solutions

AIMS Center faculty and staff at the University of Washington have worked for over 20 years to develop, test, and implement an approach called collaborative care to treat the large numbers of people suffering unnecessarily from mental illness. Collaborative care is an integrated care model that brings high-quality mental health care to primary care clinics and other familiar settings. Its strength lies in treating persistent mental health conditions like depression and anxiety that require systematic follow-up for patients to get better. Collaborative care has been tested in more than 80 randomized controlled trials in the US and abroad and has been shown to consistently lead to better patient outcomes, better patient and provider satisfaction, improved functioning, and reductions in health care costs, achieving the Triple Aim of health care reform.

As an academic institution, we’re constantly asking questions and testing solutions. We aren’t satisfied if something works; we want to know how it could work better. We ground ourselves in knowledge transfer and practice-based learning with our implementation work driving new research questions and our research results driving new implementation methodology. We continue to push the boundaries in integrated care research and offer services in workforce development, clinical consultation, and coaching and implementation support for organizations interested in putting collaborative care into practice. We’ve trained over 6,000 clinicians in collaborative care and have provided resources, training, coaching, and psychiatric consultation to more than 1,000 clinics around the world in addition to conducting integrated care research with a variety of partners.

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