APA Honors Innovative Programs

Janian Medical Care is the primary provider of psychiatric services for the Center for Urban Community Services (CUCS), employing 40 full- or part-time psychiatrists at more than 55 locations throughout New York City. In 2012, Janian began offering primary care to CUCS clients. The program had its origins in 1986 when a group of New York City psychiatrists began voluntarily offering services at dilapidated single-room-occupancy hotels and at parks and shelters where they knew they would find people struggling with homelessness and treatable mental illness. Within a decade, their efforts, known as the Project for Psychiatric Outreach to the Homeless (PPOH), had attracted the support of funding agencies, and by 2005 PPOH was providing services at 32 programs in the city. In 2005, PPOH was acquired by CUCS, a comprehensive human services agency that serves over 25,000 people each year and is the nation’s largest provider of supportive-housing social services. Despite all the changes since 1986, Janian Medical Care has remained true to its roots. CUCS Janian Medical Care was selected to receive APA’s 2013 Gold Achievement Award in the category of community-based programs.

Community Care Behavioral Health Organization (CCBHO) is a nonprofit managed care company that is part of the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center. CCBHO has implemented peer-run Decision Support Centers (DSCs) at 12 sites in its provider network since 2009. The DSCs provide people with severe mental illness with tools to prepare for their psychiatrist visits and make informed shared decisions. DSCs use CommonGround, a software program designed by Patricia Deegan, Ph.D., that helps people organize and express their treatment concerns clearly. Even people with low literacy and no computer skills can use the program’s interactive touch screens.CCBHO began a collaboration with Pat Deegan and Associates (PDA) in 2007 to develop a replicable version of CommonGround and design a standard implementation process. CCBHO sponsored implementation of the second DSC in the United States to use CommonGround and was the first of PDA’s partners to take the program to scale, playing a crucial role in the migration of Common Ground into medical practice. CCBHO received APA’s 2013 Gold Achievement Award in the category of academically or institutionally sponsored programs

The Veterans Outreach Program at the City College of San Francisco has helped veterans since 2010 adjust to college by providing comprehensive specialty on-campus mental health care from the San Francisco VA Medical Center. Veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan increasingly are enrolling in college, but many have difficulty adjusting to college life. Up to 25 percent have a psychiatric diagnosis, and many have cognitive disorders associated with a traumatic brain injury.

The Hasbro Children’s Partial Hospitalization Program, a joint program of the Department of Pediatrics and the Division of Child Psychiatry at Hasbro Children’s Hospital, Rhode Island Hospital in Providence, serves youth who have co-occurring general medical and psychiatric disorders. Patients for whom conventional approaches have failed receive individualized, intensive, integrated care in a day-hospital setting. The program has treated more than 2,200 patients since it was established in 1998. Its innovative program has become a model of integrated care for children and adolescents and their families. ■