A National Agenda for Research in Collaborative Care

At the AHRQ-funded Collaborative Care Research Network Research Development
Conference in Denver in October 2009, key national leaders took major steps toward establishing
a research agenda for collaborative care among primary care and mental health clinicians. This
set of three research papers represents the fruits of that meeting. The papers support and advance AHRQ’s
portfolio of primary care research.
The Collaborative Care Research Network (CCRN), which convened the conference, is a subnetwork
of the American Academy of Family Physicians National Research Network. CCRN was created
so that clinicians from across the country can investigate how to make collaborative care work more
effectively. CCRN is one of the practice-based research networks of primary care clinicians and
practices that work together to answer community-based health care questions and translate
research findings into practice.
The authors (Miller, Kessler, and Peek) supplied the following orientation to these papers.
The papers describe the creation of a research agenda for collaborative care. This
emerging field emphasizes the recognition and care of mental health problems in primary
care settings and the effective collaboration of primary care and mental health clinicians.
Collaborative care is regarded as an important function of the patient-centered medical
home (PCMH), and one avenue toward achieving PCMH goals for health, patient
experience, and affordability. More research is needed to identify which particular
functions or components of mental health and primary care integration lead to improved
outcomes and add value in the PCMH. Such research will have clinical, system design,
and policy implications.
This overview is intended to familiarize the reader with the interconnected purposes and
concepts in the three papers and how to navigate them as a set.