Public Health

Behavioral Health Integration (BHI) Collaborative

. 2 MIN READ
Patient speaking with health care worker in a doctor's office

In 2020, the AMA and seven other leading medical associations established the Behavioral Health Integration (BHI) Collaborative, a group dedicated to catalyzing effective and sustainable integration of behavioral and mental health care into physician practices. Initially focused on primary care, the Collaborative now has twelve members expanding to include a selection of non-primary care specialty associations whose members help manage longitudinal care for patients with chronic illnesses significantly impacted by a co-morbid mental health condition(s).

In addition to the AMA, the BHI Collaborative currently includes the collective expertise of:

  • American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry
  • American Academy of Family Physicians
  • American Academy of Neurology
  • American Academy of Pediatrics
  • American College of Cardiology
  • American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists
  • American College of Physicians
  • American Gastroenterological Association
  • American Osteopathic Association
  • American Psychiatric Association
  • American Society of Clinical Oncology

The BHI Collaborative is committed to ensuring a professionally satisfying, sustainable physician practice experience and acts as a trusted partner to help physicians and their care teams overcome the obstacles that stand in the way of meeting their patients’ behavioral health needs.

BHI Compendium

Learn what your practice needs to make the best decisions for the mental health of your patients.

Created by the BHI Collaborative, the BHI Compendium (PDF) serves as an implementation tool for any health care organization to learn about how to implement, and ultimately sustain, behavioral health integration in order to achieve the goal of enabling timely access to optimal, equitable whole-person care.

Looking for deeper dives? Check out the AMA’s strategic behavioral health guides for patient care, covering behavioral health coding, integrated behavioral health care for older adults, pharmacological treatment, practice workflow design, substance use disorder screening and treatment, and suicide prevention.

BHI webinar series

Learn directly from top subject matter experts as to how the various implementation strategies covered in the BHI Compendium can work in real-world practice settings with the BHI Collaborative's educational webinar series.

This series provides physicians and their care teams with actionable steps on how to make BHI effective in their practice, covering topics like billing and coding, non-pharmacological treatment, and behavioral health screening.  

Related podcasts

The BHI Collaborative wants to hear from you! If you have a story to share about integrating behavioral health into your practice, please email us.

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