Care Management for Depression

Care management for depression has been a part of many of the best researched programs.  Programs such as those of the MacArthur Foundation, the Impact Program and the Diamond Program have very strong research support.  The strength of these programs is that they focus on one illness and have strong population approaches and accepted measures of patient improvement.  The weakness is that they focus on one illness.  The more these programs are successful at making the move from research program to broad implementation, the more they become modified by the complexity of the presentations that patients bring to primary care.  There tends to be a broadening of the care manager role to include some mental health and behavioral health interventions or mental health/substance abuse clinicians are added to the practices. 

Some of these programs have done excellent work in making the tools developed in the research programs available to everyone.  All of the sites above have a tools page.  The one we find most complete and generous is from the Institute for Clinical Systems Improvement that represents the Diamond Program.