About

Advancing Care Together

This four-year program aimed to discover practical models to integrate mental health, substance use, and primary care services for people whose health problems and health care needs span physical, emotional, and behavioral domains. The program funded 11 demonstration projects that were organized as a set of diverse comparative case studies and linked to support cross-project learning.

ACT invited primary care practices and community mental health centers to learn what could be accomplished in real world settings to integrate care for children, adolescents and adults. To optimize learning, ACT funded a portfolio of Colorado projects in diverse geographic areas and that employed a range of care delivery models.

ACT relied on the imagination and practical knowledge of people working day-to-day to care for people within their communities. The program recognized that individuals’ health care needs vary in severity and responsiveness to treatment, that local resources and barriers are highly variable, and that these realities may dictate what care is offered and where health care is received.

There should be no wrong door in a properly constructed system — whether people understand their problem as emotional, behavioral, or physical; their needs should be addressed in an integrated fashion.

The program’s goals:

• Identify and test promising demonstrations to provide integrated care for patients and clients in primary care and community mental health settings.
• Evaluate processes and outcomes of demonstrations to determine what strategies work and don’t work and what it takes to provide integrated care in real life settings.
• Disseminate best practices and real-time lessons from ACT to other practices in Colorado trying to integrate care for their patients, as well as to other interested stakeholders.

The program’s three phases:

• Phase 1 began with the release of the Call for Proposals and ended with the selection and funding of 11 demonstration projects.
• Phase 2 consisted of three years of active work on the implementation and on-the-ground learning and evaluation of the demonstration projects.
• Phase 3 encompassed a period of targeted synthesis and distillation of ACT’s lessons with emphasis on diffusion of best practices across key audiences in Colorado and nationally.

The program’s organization and leadership:

• Funded by The Colorado Health Foundation
• Located at the University of Colorado Department of Family Medicine
• Overseen by a steering committee of national and local experts
• Directed by an experienced program office and evaluation team led by Dr. Larry Green and Dr. Deborah Cohen