Behavioral health needs an integrated EHR. Here’s why.

The challenge of behavioral health in EHRs: how do you treat the whole patient?

Behavioral health care is becoming ever more intertwined with primary healthcare — to the enormous benefit of patients and whole-person care. In integrated care models such as primary care behavioral health (PCBH) and collaborative care models (CoCM), licensed behavioral health professionals are embedded with multidisciplinary care teams, working together to manage the overall health of their patients. Some primary care clinicians offer behavioral health care as well, treating patients’ mental health and substance use conditions alongside physical concerns. Multi-specialty practices and providers like these offer much-needed access to behavioral health care for patients who might be reluctant to seek it out on their own.

With their dual emphasis on primary and behavioral care, these integrated behavioral health care teams and providers face a technological dilemma: how to ensure seamless, holistic patient management when the electronic health record isn’t set up to support it. Many EHRs designed for traditional care don’t have the necessary features and tools to accommodate mental health treatment. They're an inadequate choice that puts these providers at a disadvantage from the start.

Behavioral health is health. Treating the whole patient is the goal. But not all EHRs have caught up to that reality. The right EHR should provide both behavioral health-specific workflows and a full set of primary care features to support comprehensive patient care.

Why standard EHRs can fall short for behavioral health care

It can be inefficient at best — and potentially dangerous at worst — to deliver integrated behavioral health care using an EHR that isn’t designed to support it. Here’s why that’s a problem:

• Lack of behavioral health-specific templates & documentation – Behavioral health providers need workflows for subjective, objective, assessment, and plan notes (SOAP notes), progress tracking, and treatment plans, which are often missing in standard EHRs.
• Limited integration with primary care data – Without visibility into a patient’s health record, a behavioral health practitioner may miss valuable information and insights. For instance, a behavioral health provider treating anxiety should be able to see if the patient’s primary care doctor recently prescribed beta blockers for high blood pressure, as this could affect their symptoms.
• Rigid clinical workflows – A workflow that has been optimized for physical exams may not suit a typical behavioral health encounter. Behavioral health treatment often requires more flexible, narrative-style documentation compared to structured medical templates.

Without these critical features, providers delivering behavioral health care may have to make do with workarounds, paper notes, or separate software. It’s not only about trying to deliver care with inefficient tools — it can also disrupt the continuity of care and have a real impact on patient outcomes.

Primary care and behavioral health: why one EHR should handle both

When integrated teams and primary/behavioral health providers try to coordinate care on an EHR that’s not designed to support behavioral health, critical patient information can fall through the cracks. Consider these possible scenarios:

• A primary care physician treating a patient for anxiety can enter prescription updates into the EHR, but can’t capture comprehensive notes from therapy sessions without spending extra time on an inefficient workaround.
• A behavioral health clinician prescribes medication for bipolar disorder, but they might not realize that the primary care physician recently started the patient on a new heart medication that has contraindications.
• A behavioral health provider works with a patient recovering from opioid addiction, but there’s no easy way to track whether the patient is also getting appropriate pain management support from their PCP.

In all of these hypothetical cases, electronic health records that don’t have behavioral health workflows make holistic care more difficult to deliver. A truly interoperable EHR that integrates behavioral health and primary care workflows can help to eliminate these knowledge gaps, ensuring that patient records are complete and all providers on the team can see the full picture of a patient’s health.

A truly interoperable EHR that integrates behavioral health and primary care workflows ensures all providers on the team can see the full picture of a patient’s health.

The solution: a comprehensive electronic health record for behavioral health & primary care

A modern, fully integrated EHR can bridge the gap between behavioral and physical health, providing integrated care teams the best of both worlds. Here’s what to look for in behavioral health EHR software that truly supports holistic patient care:

• Behavioral health-specific templates & workflows – Support for individual and group session documentation, treatment plans, and risk assessments.
• Primary care tools – Chronic disease management, lab integrations, immunization tracking, and medication reconciliation.
• Seamless data sharing – Instant access to relevant medical history, prescriptions, and prior treatment across all providers involved in a patient’s care.
• Customizable documentation options – Both structured medical forms and narrative-style therapy documentation, allowing providers to document in ways that make sense for their specialty.

How athenaOne® supports integrated care teams

With athenaOne, integrated care teams and primary care physicians treating behavioral health conditions no longer need to settle for an electronic health record that falls short. Our EHR for behavioral health offers:

• Pre-built behavioral health templates for therapy, psychiatric, and substance use disorder treatments.
• A fully integrated primary care suite for managing medications, chronic conditions, and lab results.
• A seamless, cloud-based system with interoperability support that allows all providers treating a patient to access relevant information in real time.
• Ambient listening and other AI-powered documentation tools to help reduce administrative burden and improve efficiency for all providers.

Care coordination made simpler with athenaOne

Clinicians don’t have to participate in integrated care models themselves to benefit from athenaOne’s advantages. For primary care physicians who rely on offsite behavioral health professionals to support their patients’ needs, athenaOne’s built-in ChartSync feature pulls in available patient data from hospitals, health systems, pharmacies, and other linked sources, deduplicates it, and surfaces it in the clinical workflow. The clinician can access a more complete patient history — and deliver care that supports the whole person, body and mind.

The future of behavioral health integration

The fragmentation of behavioral health and primary care is no longer sustainable. Patients deserve a healthcare system where their mental and physical health are treated together, not in silos. The right electronic health records software should empower behavioral health specialists and primary care providers to work collaboratively, ensuring patients get the most effective, coordinated care possible.

If your current EHR makes it difficult to integrate behavioral health and primary care workflows, it may be time to explore an EHR for behavioral health that truly supports whole-person care. Learn more about how athenaOne can transform your practice by providing the comprehensive functionality needed for success with integrated care models.