Why Collaborative Care
How the Collaborative Care Model helps providers meet their patients' behavioral health needs and improve outcomes.
What is Collaborative Care?
The Collaborative Care Model is an evidence-based model for integrating mental health and substance use services in primary care settings. While integrated care at any level can be valuable, the Collaborative Care Model has been extensively researched and has proven outcomes.
Under the model, patients receive care from a primary care team and mental health professionals, including a behavioral health care manager and a consulting psychiatrist.
By serving as “consultants” to primary care providers, psychiatrists who work in the Collaborative Care Model can serve a far greater number of patients than they could in traditional one-on-one psychiatry visits.
With guidance from consulting psychiatrists, primary care providers see patients directly and address their behavioral health concerns in a familiar setting. This way, far more patients can access behavioral health treatment, and psychiatrists can reserve traditional face-to-face visits for patients with more severe or acute needs.
In a previous Healthy Minds analysis, we estimated that a psychiatrist who works in the Collaborative Care Model can serve approximately 226,800 patients over their lifetime — about 13 times more than a psychiatrist not practicing in the Collaborative Care Model, which we estimate can serve about 17,500 patients in their lifetime.
Psychiatrists' lifetime patients served
Understanding Integrated Behavioral Health Care and the Collaborative Care Model
The evidence for Collaborative Care
Studies have shown that Collaborative Care leads to better mental and physical health outcomes. In a large analysis of 79 randomized controlled trials of Collaborative Care, researchers found that patients being treated in the model for depression or anxiety showed better short-term and long-term outcomes compared to those treated otherwise. Results also showed improvement in secondary benefits including medication use, mental health quality of life, and patient satisfaction.
One study found that twice as many patients improved when receiving care for depression through the Collaborative Care Model versus typical care.
Among patients with depression and cancer, patients treated using Collaborative Care saw more improvement, less pain and fatigue, and better quality of life.
It has also been shown to be cost-effective: A meta-analysis of 22 studies evaluating the cost-effectiveness of collaborative care indicated that Collaborative Care programs were at the very least cost-neutral, with most studies showing actual savings. Typical cost savings estimates for patients receiving Collaborative Care range from 5% to 10% of total healthcare costs over a period of two to four years.
Another study found that people receiving Collaborative Care are 54% less likely to go to the emergency room and 49% less likely to require inpatient psychiatric care.
2025 Directory, 2nd Edition: Collaborative Care Service Organizations (CSOs)
Mounting Evidence That Use of the Collaborative Care Model Reduces Total Healthcare Costs
Get updates from the Oklahoma Integrated Care Resource Center
Sign up for our newsletter to get occasional updates from the Center in your inbox about new resources, training opportunitites, and more.
.svg)
.svg)
