Integrated Care @ NEOMED Journal Club: Metformin for the prevention of antipsychotic...

Course overview

Integrated care broadly refers to a coordinated approach to healthcare that brings together various services, such as medical, behavioral, and social care, to ensure that patients receive comprehensive, person-centered care across different settings and providers. People with serious mental illnesses (SMI) have a reduced average lifespan, dying of the same medical conditions as the rest of the population, cardiovascular disease, respiratory disorders, metabolic conditions, cancer, etc. Structural barriers have made it a challenge to implement any one particular model of integration in community settings (Little and Walker, 2024). Thus, integrated care look very different across Ohio. And to work in teams, across professions, specialties and settings, professionals need to acquire a non-traditional set of knowledge, skills and attitudes (Barraclough, et. al, 2021). By offering a weekly virtual community of practice, the IC@N ECHO can tailor evidence-based and emerging best practice didactic content to the network of participants, changing landscape of health care, and evolving needs of communities. Didactic content for the IC@N ECHO will address how to treat medical conditions in SMI patients, as well as content that speaks to the known workforce challenges in integrating care, culture, limited opportunities for interprofessional collaboration and communication, knowledge, skills and attitudes. IC@N ECHO will also support the network with case-based learning, creating space to addressing clinical challenges in real-time.