Behavioral healthcare integration needs nursing support
Nurse Leader Insider, November 5, 2015
Want to receive articles like this one in your inbox? Subscribe to Nurse Leader Insider!
Jennifer Thew, RN, for HealthLeaders Media , November 3, 2015
Mental illness often overlaps with medical illness. In an acute care setting, which group of providers should lead the patient's care? Nurses are natural integrators, but can't do it without support from leadership.
I have known five people who've lost their lives through suicide—one for each finger on my hand. I don't have enough digits to count the number of people I know who have dealt with anxiety, depression, eating disorders, alcoholism, or bi-polar disorder. And those are the ones who are willing to talk about it.
I'm sure many more friends and acquaintances silently cope with mental illness because of its social stigma, and there's data that supports my hunch. According to the National Alliance on Mental Illness, one in four adults experiences mental illness in a given year.
Behavioral health is something worth talking about, and healthcare providers need to get in on the conversation if they want to improve patients' mental and physical health and provide value-based care, says Martha Whitecotton, RN, MSN, senior vice president of Behavioral Health Services at Carolinas Healthcare System.
"The real drive is starting around this now because of population health, because of accountable care organizations, and because of the way that people are going to be paid—placing their payment at risk for overall health and overall cost," she says. "It's forcing the conversation around what do we do about mental illness."
Read the rest of this free article by clicking here.
Want to receive articles like this one in your inbox? Subscribe to Nurse Leader Insider!
Related Products
Most Popular
- Articles
-
- Don't forget the three checks in medication administration
- Note similarities and differences between HCPCS, CPT® codes
- The consequences of an incomplete medical record
- OB services: Coding inside and outside of the package
- Complications from immobility by body system
- Q&A: Primary, principal, and secondary diagnoses
- Practice the six rights of medication administration
- Nursing responsibilities for managing pain
- Differentiate between types of wound debridement
- Skills of effective case managers
- E-mailed
-
- Correctly bill ancillary bedside procedures in addition to the room rate
- Q/A: Coding infusions to correct low potassium levels
- Q&A: Utilization Review Committee Membership
- Q&A: Bill blood administration the same way for inpatient and outpatient accounts
- Q&A: A second look at encephalopathy as integral to seizures/CVA
- OB services: Coding inside and outside of the package
- Know the medical gas cylinder storage requirements
- Intravenous therapy guidelines
- Coding, billing, and documentation tips for teaching physicians, interns, residents, and students
- Coding tip: Watch for different codes for SI joint injections
- Searched