Our community is a rarity in the healthcare world. We do not represent a guild. We do not represent a sector of the healthcare industry. We do not represent a disease category. We represent an idea.

That idea is that healthcare works best when professionals, in tandem with families and their communities, work together within systems that support their “together” work. That’s why our mission is: “To support healthcare professionals in integrating physical and behavioral health.”

That idea runs counter to the design of healthcare policies, many of which we have spent the last few decades skirting or working around to enable team-based care for our patients. So, we thought it was high-time our association, the Collaborative Family Healthcare Association (CFHA) developed a set of principles to guide which healthcare policies we would stand behind and which we would seek to change. Note these are not policies themselves, just principles for thinking about policies that either support or stand in the way of integrated healthcare.

So, now we want you to weigh in. If you are a CFHA member, let us know whether you can stand by these principles, and if there are perhaps principles that are missing. To help you understand how we think of these principles we included examples in italics below each principle heading. And, importantly, it is important to consider that these principles do not stand in isolation. They should be considered in the context of our mission, vision and values. If you are not a CFHA member, happy to have you look on and if you like what you see, consider joining!

So, here they are. What do you think? Comment below.

CFHA Promotes Healthcare Policies That:

• Promote the inclusion of integrated behavioral and medical care in health policy initiatives
  • For example, the patient centered medical home should have integrated care as a guiding design principle.
• Expand the integrated care workforce 
  • For example, CFHA supports the inclusion by payers of all licensed BH professionals as reimbursement eligible. 
• Promote fiscal and administrative integration of behavioral and medical services
  • For example, CFHA supports efforts to include behavioral health services in global payment strategies.
  • For example, CFHA supports eliminating reimbursement barriers to the viability of team-based care like same-day visit payment restrictions or copays for additional team member touches.
  • For example, CFHA supports efforts to regulate behavioral and medical health within the same departmental entities when possible.
  • For example, CFHA supports telehealth care provision payment and regulatory parity between behavioral health and medical services.
• Promote social justice and health equity of all kinds
  • For example, CFHA supports the movement to necessitate that all health systems adopt the CLAS Standards.
• Enable practitioners to engage families and communities
  • For example, CFHA supports payers in redefining units of service so that work with a mother and child could be reimbursed as one unit of service.