The gaps between research, practice and policy, in all configurations, significantly impair the rapidity of progress for improving health care. These gaps, coupled with pressing situations such as budget cuts, rising health care costs, increased rates of working uninsured, and undue variations in care for common problems, are what often make up the content of health services research. Given the tremendous disease burdens associated with mental disorders and drug/alcohol use conditions (DAU), and the impact of these conditions on other medical disorders, there is a need to better align the often separate areas of drug addiction and alcohol and mental health (MH) services research into a more integrative behavioral health services research platform. Furthermore, there is a need to 'mainstream'these areas into general health services research (HSR). These areas often share many common and pressing problems and a move to better integrate these behavioral health services research (BHSR) areas can achieve important economies of scientific learning, scale, and scope. Recent and ongoing national and international events such as war, the methamphetamine epidemic and natural disaster like Katrina pose urgent questions for behavioral health care, and research opportunities for intersection. Therefore, we propose a multi-disciplinary scientific conference effort that will 1.) develop a collaborative and strategic research agenda to improve behavioral health services delivery to people (across the life span) who suffer from drug use/abuse problems, alcohol use, and mental health problems;and, 2.) engage and partner researchers and other key stakeholders such as patients, families, providers, policymakers, and communities to contribute to and implement this agenda. A desired and tangible outcome will be the creation of 'new'research teams comprised of people from the different arenas who have not worked together previously. This series of three conferences will use innovative features such as a virtual collaboratory and ongoing literature and portfolio reviews to inform the conference planning and agendas, and seek to move each conference beyond a single, discrete event, but to a dynamic and continuous platform for research production and dissemination and new BHSR teams. The specific project goals for this research conference plan are to: 1. establish an on-going virtually connected platform of behavioral health services researchers to provide leadership for an integrative approach for shared problems across drug abuse, alcohol use problems and mental disorders: disparities, quality of care, and co-occurring conditions;2. create new research teams to study at least two of the three shared problems;3. identify and engage researchers from disciplines not traditionally associated with behavioral health services research;and, 4. utilize a 'virtual collaboratory'to connect researchers and other stakeholders.
| Hills, Holly; Richards, Tara (2014) Modeling interdisciplinary research to advance behavioral health care. J Behav Health Serv Res 41:3-7 |
