Improving Mental Health Services for Low-Income Latinos in Primary Care

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IMPROVING MENTAL HEALTH SERVICES FOR LOW-INCOME LATINOS IN PRIMARY CARE Building community capacity to deliver accessible mental health services to Latino Immigrants is much needed. Latinos in the US are less likely to utilize mental health services than non-Latino Whites, and they are less likely to receive guideline-concordant care, with disparities increasing. The Community Academic Partnership for Mental Health (CAP-MH) seeks to address these concerns by strengthening an existing partnership between the Center for Trauma and the Community (CTC) in the Psychiatry Department at Georgetown Medical School, and the Primary Care Coalition (PCC) of Montgomery County, to support the timely development and evaluation of culturally competent, trauma-sensitive, and innovative interventions to improve patient mental health. A major goal of this project is to integrate clinical research into the clinical care process at the community clinic level. Thus, PCC¿s electronic medical record (EMR) will be improved by upgrading the mental health section, including the addition of custom data elements required for specific research protocol interventions, and essential functionalities, including improved data summary functions. Once the EMR has been upgraded, a naturalistic evaluation of the Montgomery Cares Behavioral Health Program (MCBHP) will be conducted, comparing clinics with and without the program. The study aims include, 1) To evaluate the extent of implementation of the ongoing MCBHP via examination of MCBHP-related process parameters, including extent of guideline-concordant care provision; 2) To evaluate the effectiveness of the MCBHP on mental health outcomes (depression, anxiety); and, 3) among the subset of patients with comorbid chronic health conditions (diabetes, hypertension, obesity), to evaluate the effectiveness of the MCBHP on mental health, health behaviors, and health-related outcomes. Background support work will include interviews and focus groups with providers and other staff, whose input will be used to help design flexible aspects of the EMR and the study. This partnership will begin to serve as a laboratory for community-informed intervention development to improve services, and ultimately the health, of a large underserved minority population. Narrative (for the lay public) Latino populations have difficulty accessing culturally sensitive mental health services. The proposed project will address these disparities by building the community¿s capacity to develop and study mental health services for the Latino community in a primary care service provider organization in Montgomery County, MD. A study of a clinical program that is already delivering mental health services in the community will be evaluated, with clinicians and staff providing input to help us design the study.