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Over the past five years, sites working in an innovative, Archstone Foundation-supported project to improve depression care for older persons, known as Care Partners, have enrolled more than 700 older adults in depression treatment. Many of those served by the project achieved a clinically significant improvement in their depression symptoms, with an observed rate of improvement that is roughly two times better than usual depression care for older adults in the United States.

Those encouraging results have prompted the Foundation to launch a year-long Learning Collaborative that is targeted to expand the project’s reach to 10 additional clinics and community-based organizations in California interested in improving late-life depression care.

Since 2015, the Foundation has supported the development and evaluation of Care Partners, which includes community-based organizations or family members as part of the care team as a means to extend the reach of high-quality, team-based depression care.

Care Partners builds on the concept of collaborative care, a patient-centered approach in primary care that treats mental health conditions — such as depression and anxiety — in an environment where older adults are comfortable and already have secure, ongoing relationships. Effective collaborative care teams use established principles of chronic illness care and draw upon shared knowledge and care plans as they work toward individualized patient goals.

With several years of experience working in partnered collaborative care to treat depression among older adults, current Care Partners sites have gained valuable insights and learned key principles for improving care. Through the new Learning Collaborative, these lessons will be shared with new organizations seeking to engage in similar programs at their clinics.

Making a Difference in More Patients’ Lives

An experienced Care Partners technical assistance team from the University of Washington (UW) and University of California, Davis (UCD) will lead the Learning Collaborative. Interested organizations (clinic and community-based organization partners) can apply for seed funding to launch new or build upon existing collaborations in their communities through a Request for Proposal (RFP) process led by the technical assistance team at UW. Selected participants will work together to improve depression care and reduce mental health disparities for older adults.

“This is an exciting opportunity for organizations to learn, collaborate, innovate, and improve their depression care responses, to address our patients’ medical, psychological, and social care needs, and to make sure that thousands of older adults who are served in our organizations don’t ‘fall through the cracks,’” says Jürgen Unützer, MD, MPH, MA, an expert in late-life depression who leads the technical assistance team at UW.

“After two decades of working to improve depression in primary care, we have learned that effective partnerships with community-based organizations help us reach more people in need and make more of a difference in our patients’ lives,” Unützer adds. “We have also learned that such partnerships aren’t easy to set up or to sustain. But with a champion in each partner organization, an engaged staff, and targeted technical assistance supported by the Archstone Foundation, the Learning Collaborative will help organizations learn and share new approaches, overcome barriers, re-tool when needed, and achieve outstanding care for the older adults they serve.”

For example, during the initial Care Partners work, sites quickly discovered that collaboration and task-sharing across organizations is a simple idea that can get complicated in practice. To address this challenge, sites learned to develop efficient processes, shared workflows, and tools to track their collaboration and to make certain that each activity was clearly assigned to a team member. A shared tracking tool helped partnering organizations keep track of older adults served and the tasks needed to help improve their depression. The shared tool also helped ensure that patients who were not improving as expected got adequate attention.

Building or Strengthening Partnerships to Enhance Depression Care

Interested organizations may include primary care clinics and community partners in California, community-based and other organizations committed to improving depression care for older adults, and clinics serving Medicare Advantage beneficiaries and other large older adult populations. Organizations can be at any stage of partnership, but must identify a partner to apply for participation in the Learning Collaborative.

The Foundation certainly understands that care is more complex than ever, given the changing COVID-19 guidelines and safety precautions. So why would health providers elect to join the Learning Collaborative and take on more changes right now? To improve care for older adults with depression.

Selected sites will participate in the year-long Collaborative that includes a series of webinars on evidence-based depression care and two in-person learning sessions in October 2021 and June 2022. They will also have monthly coaching calls with a designated coach from the Collaborative’s technical assistance team and have opportunities to network with and learn from other sites in the Collaborative.

Learning goals will help organizations build or strengthen partnerships to enhance depression care, focusing on different aspects of care, such as:

  • Finding and engaging patients and family members in depression care;
  • Developing and implementing shared care plans;
  • Monitoring, adjusting, adapting, and sustaining quality improvement processes for depression care; and
  • Adapting evidence-based practices for diverse and underserved populations to reduce mental health disparities.

The Request for Proposals will officially launch on January 1, 2021, with proposals accepted on an ongoing basis through May 31, 2021, or until the 10 positions are filled. Participating sites will each receive $20,000 to support time and travel for participation in the Learning Collaborative.

For additional information about the Learning Collaborative or how to apply, please contact: uwcp2@uw.edu.

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