Improving Care for Comorbid Physical and Mental Illness

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DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): This revised K24 Mid-Career Research and Mentoring Program application describes a succession of mentoring, training, and research activities that will: (1) prepare beginning clinical researchers to become successful patient-oriented investigators in areas relevant to the interests of NIMH; (2) enhance the mentoring capabilities of the Principal Investigator; and (3) build on the theoretical and practical foundations established in current NIMH-funded work to enhance simultaneous care of depression and major medical co-morbidities in general medical settings. The applicant is an experienced patient-oriented researcher with interests in quality of care and outcomes for patients with comorbid physical and psychological conditions and a substantial record of mentoring success. Mentorship will be provided at three levels of commitment: informal, project-specific, and intensive. The intensive program will identify two junior scholars per year through established recruitment mechanisms. The PI will provide scholars with career guidance, help them identify appropriate didactic courses and special experiences, facilitate their research projects, develop new didactic courses, and provide assistance with manuscript preparation, grant writing, and presentational skills. Personal training experiences are designed to enhance the Pi's ability to mentor junior scholars interested in addressing health disparities at the border-zone of medicine and psychiatry, using information technologies to improve quality of care for depression, and conducting research on the treatment of mental health conditions in primary care settings. The Research Plan will build on the theoretical and practical foundations of the ongoing Consumer Influences on Depression Project to collect pilot data on the use of standardized patients to improve quality of care for comorbid depression and chronic medical illness.