Our Story
"The Center for Integrated Primary Care (CIPC) offers online topic-focused courses, timely webinars, live workshops, and consulting. Our courses build on our experience, informed by our real-world practice and research.
We understand the benefits and the challenges of integrating behavioral health into primary care. CIPC faculty are clinician-educators who care for patients in busy family medicine practices and who train primary care providers and behavioral health trainees to work as a team. We know what it takes to be successful and can help you achieve your own success.
The Center's courses began in 2007 with a 6 webinar program to orient behavioral health providers to the culture of primary care. In day-long sessions, we began retraining traditional mental health care providers to provide timely, efficient, and effective care for complex patients, including those with chronic pain, substance use disorders, depression, or medically unexplained symptoms. This was pioneering work by our founding director, Dr. Alexander Blount. He partnered with UMass family physicians and specialists to engage in conversations about making behavioral health an integral part of patient care.
The demand for this training resulted in our most popular online course, Primary Care Behavioral Health. Over time the course content has evolved to reflect the growth of integration, and we have trained many thousands of providers to adopt a more holistic view of their patients' needs both mental and physical.
Since then, CIPC has continued to develop resources to advance integration under the leadership of Daniel Mullin, PsyD, MPH who took over as director of the Center in 2016. We have added online courses exploring topics such as patient-centered care management, motivational interviewing, and medical group visits.
In addition to developing courses, CIPC faculty often consult with groups who have particular needs and challenges. One of our special areas of expertise is Opioid Use Dependence (OUD).
Our passion for this subject and our expertise in developing online medical education led to a collaboration with the other Massachusetts medical schools: Harvard, Tufts, and Boston University. With the support of SAMHSA grant 1H79TI081671* CIPC led the way in developing an ASAM-approved, online DATA Waiver course for medical students. Once fully implemented, every medical student graduating in the Commonwealth will be eligible to receive their DEA-X number allowing them to prescribe the medications needed to provide relief and support for those individuals with OUD.
In a related project, a large healthcare organization in upstate New York serving a rural population sought help from us on increasing the number of medical providers who were able and willing to seek their DATA Waiver in order to prescribe the medications needed to address OUD in their locale. Our work there, using consultation with management, in-person group presentations, as well as Project ECHO has been declared transformative and has been acknowledged with State awards. The experience gained doing this work has led to our ability to train other organizations in skills that go beyond the DEAX Waiver, convincing them that MOUD is effective and is especially well-suited to integrated primary care settings.
CIPC faculty in collaboration with UMass physicians have taught audiences from Maine to Alaska that medication-assisted treatment for opioid use is possible and desirable in primary care practices. We developed a program on harm reduction for a small college in Florida whose students are often first-generation. And we work with FQHCs to train personnel and launch new programs. CIPC's reach extends far beyond the small screen
If you or your organization need training, either online or in-person, we can help.