Integrating Primary Care: The Dimensions of the Job

Alexander Blount, EdD

Alexander Blount, EdD has been developing clinical service models and training programs throughout his 45-year career. In the first 20 years of his career he worked as: a clinician and Director of Training in a private mental health center, the Director of Clinical Services in a public mental health center, a faculty member at the Ackerman Institute for the Family in New York, and the Director of the outpatient psychiatry service in a regional medical center.  In 1996, he was appointed Director of Behavioral Science in the Department of Family Medicine and Community Health at the University of Massachusetts Medical School in Worcester, MA, where he worked until 2015.  He was responsible for teaching family medicine residents the psychosocial and behavioral skills of primary care.  In 1999, he launched the Postdoctoral Fellowship in Clinical Health Psychology which trains psychologists to be members of the primary healthcare team.  In 2007, he launched an online course to train clinicians living around the country as well as in Europe and Asia in the skills of Primary Care Behavioral Health. The program has trained over 4000 clinicians. Dr. Blount is now a Professor Emeritus of Family Medicine and continues to consult to the Center for Integrated Primary Care, which he founded in 2012, at the Medical School.  He is a member of the National Integration Academy Council of the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, past Editor of Families, Systems, and Health, and past president of the Collaborative Family Healthcare Association from whom he received The Don Bloch Award for contributions to the field of collaborative healthcare in 2011.  

In 1998, he published Integrated Primary Care: The Future of Medical and Mental Health Collaboration
(W.W. Norton).  This was the first book on integrated primary care and was instrumental to defining the field.

His newest book, Patient-Centered Primary Care: Getting from Good to Great, was published by Springer in August of 2019.  This watershed volume collects and synthesizes the evidence on patient-centered care and team-based care (of which behavioral health integration is an important element).  In addition, it offers an approach that weaves the best of primary care behavioral health methods into the practice of the whole health team to help in caring for its multiply-disadvantaged patients.  This results in care that is Transparent, Empowering, Activating, and Mutual: the T.E.A.M. Way.

Through his consulting firm, Integrated Primary Care Inc., Dr. Blount partners with primary care practices, health systems, medical and mental health training institutions, and state health authorities to offer consultation and training in behavioral health integration, patient-centered primary care transformation, and primary care behavioral health workforce development around the US and overseas.