This 12-week online learning collaborative will introduce participants to telehealth with a focus on how to get started. Even before COVID-19, telehealth offers a ready to use tool that can increase access to care for mental health and help you connect with new patients and augment care for existing ones. But now amidst COVID-19, using telehealth is essential to connect patients to care. But like all tools, telehealth can at first appear complex to approach and this learning collaborative is designed to offer you to knowledge and skills to feel confident and ready to begin offering virtual care for SMI patients.

Instructor: John Torous, MD, MBI, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center

For complete details visit: SMIadviser.org/telemental-health-oct

This 12-week online learning collaborative will serve as a virtual community for participants to gain knowledge of evidence-based models of care and receive support and feedback on how to implement those models to effectively improve physical outcomes in patients with Serious Mental Illnesses (SMI).

Instructor: Benjamin Druss, MD, MPH, Emory University

For complete details visit: SMIadviser.org/whole-health

This 12-week online learning collaborative is intended to help you develop a step-by-step plan for bringing peer support into an existing behavioral health agency or practice, in a manner that enhances services. Each participant will develop the essential documents and tools for designing a plan to introduce peer support into a provider agency.

Instructor: Patrick Hendry, Mental Health America

For complete details visit: SMIadviser.org/integrating-peers

This 12-week online learning collaborative is best suited for mental health professionals with existing peer support service programs. During the course, you will explore how to measure and maintain quality in peer services through the development and implementation of quality improvement standards. Each participant will design a behavioral health project using peer support services and develop fidelity and outcome measures for the peer support component.

Instructor: Patrick Hendry, Mental Health America

For complete details visit: SMIadviser.org/peer-quality

This 12-week online learning collaborative is designed to give participants advanced skills and knowledge to develop and implement comprehensive psychiatric mental health nursing assessments in a variety of health care and community settings.  Content will include a review of psychiatric diagnoses and symptoms along with comorbid medical conditions and complications of patients with serious mental illnesses. Discussion of assessment and monitoring strategies for medical and psychiatric diagnoses will enhance the understanding and skills of participants.  The applied skills and knowledge obtained in this course will provide a basis for establishing effective care that will identify and address a variety of health care problems and risks encountered in patients with serious mental illnesses and support patients in recovery.

Instructor: Donna Rolin, PhD, APRN, University of Texas at Austin

For complete details visit: SMIadviser.org/nursing-assessment

This 12-week online learning collaborative will introduce participants to telehealth with a focus on how to get started. Even before COVID-19, telehealth offers a ready to use tool that can increase access to care for mental health and help you connect with new patients and augment care for existing ones. But now amidst COVID-19, using telehealth is essential to connect patients to care. But like all tools, telehealth can at first appear complex to approach and this learning collaborative is designed to offer you to knowledge and skills to feel confident and ready to begin offering virtual care for SMI patients.

Instructor: John Torous, MD, MBI, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center

For complete details visit: SMIadviser.org/telemental-health-nov

Clozapine can be very rewarding to prescribe, since about half of patients with prior poor treatment response get substantially better with clozapine. This medication can result in major improvements in patients’ functioning and quality of life. This 12-week virtual learning collaborative is intended for clinicians who want to prescribe more clozapine or build a clozapine program that they will direct. Through the 12-week activity, participants will increase access to clozapine using the following steps: involve and gain support from members of a clozapine team, assess patient eligibility for clozapine, lead the care team for tracking of side effects and response and delivery of clozapine, ensure provision of education for patients or families, and routinely track panels of clozapine patients. By the end of the course, participants will have increased appropriate access to clozapine among their patient panel or the panels of clinicians who they supervise. And, they will have procedures in place that facilitate clozapine use on an ongoing basis, making clozapine as easy to prescribe as other psychotropic medications.

Instructors:

• Robert O. Cotes, MD, Emory University
• Jonathan Meyer, MD, University of California, San Diego

For complete details visit: SMIadviser.org/building-clozapine-practice

This 12-week virtual learning collaborative focuses on training the clinician to use the Brief Psychiatric Rating Scale (BPRS) and the Role Functioning Scale (RFS) as structured assessment tools to improve the quality of care for patients with serious mental illness. Clinicians will gain the expertise needed to administer the BPRS to assess symptoms by rating actual BPRS patient interviews and discussing their ratings in comparison to the “gold standard” consensus ratings. Participants will learn to use the RFS to assess daily functioning and use both symptom ratings and assessments of functioning as part of an evidence-based treatment approach for improving patient outcomes. Special attention will be placed on how to conduct these assessments remotely during the COVID-19 pandemic. In addition, this course will help clinicians to develop and implement a Measurement-Based Care (MBC) model that can be incorporated into an agency’s clinical flow through the use of a data tracking system, be useful to multiple clinical disciplines, and help improve short-term and long-term patient outcomes.

Instructor: Joseph Ventura, PhD, University of California, Los Angeles

For complete details visit: SMIadviser.org/symptom-funct-assess

Few, if any, evidence based practices have been intentional about incorporating cultural competence into the model. When culture is unaddressed, therapeutic walls instead of therapeutic bridges can be built, leading to tension in the clinical relationship. This can render the evidence-based practice ineffective. Topics covered in this skill-building presentation include: the 10 things that culturally competent counselors do; building trust in the cross cultural helping relationship; and integrating cultural competence into evidence based practices with individuals with co-occurring disorders.

Presenter: Mark Sanders, LCSW, CADC, On The Mark Consulting

For complete details visit: SMIadviser.org/cultural-competency

As a newer discipline, implementation science has the potential to address gaps in behavioral health services delivery. This presentation will provide a basic introduction to key constructs in dissemination and implementation (D&I) research and practice. Overview of types of explanatory frameworks, distinctions between interventions and implementation strategies, and the differences between patient-level and implementation outcomes will be addressed. New and innovative methods to measure key constructs will be described. Discussion will focus on how D&I approaches might be useful in addressing existing gaps in patient access to and routine delivery of proven evidence-based interventions.

Presenter: Heather J. Gotham, PhD, Stanford University

For complete details visit: SMIadviser.org/implementation-science

This talk will first review the evidence of mobile health apps to meet clinical and wellness goals for people with SMI. Using this evidence as a launching point, the talk will then outline the opportunity for technology to augment integrated care for people with SMI. To illustrate real world examples, the talk will focus on a case with the goal of offering case based learning from a study that explored the feasibility of integrating depression self-management smartphone apps into primary care for an underserved patient population. Adult patients with an active or previous depression diagnosis were eligible to participate. Participants were asked to complete measures which explored health literacy, and patient activation, along with questions pertaining to smartphone ownership, type of data plan, and willingness to use apps for self-management. Patient and provider/staff focus groups were conducted at clinic sites to explore the feasibility of using smartphone apps for depression management. Initial findings suggest that patients are likely to attempt app use for self-management when physicians make this suggestion. Results also suggest that giving patients an array of smartphone apps to choose from increases their likelihood of app use. The presentation will offer learners a suite of tools and resources to implement such in their care settings. Cultural and other real world considerations will be discussed.

Presenter: Margaret Emerson, DNP, APRN, PMHNP-BC, University of Nebraska Medical Center (UNMC)

For complete details visit: SMIadviser.org/depression-apps