What is the Washington Integrated Care Assessment (WA-ICA)?
The WA-ICA is a continuum-based integration assessment tool meant to:
- Develop an improvement roadmap for clinical practices to advance integration and whole-person care.
- Reduce provider administrative burden by minimizing duplication of assessments.
- Understand the level of and progress toward clinical integration within behavioral health and primary care outpatient practices.
- Improve patient outcomes.
- Provide regional and statewide data to support and influence policy and funding decisions.
The WA-ICA is based on two continuum-based assessment tools developed in New York State by Dr. Henry Chung and colleagues. Their work is summarized in these reports: Continuum-based Framework for Behavioral Health Integration into Primary Care and Continuum-based Framework for General Health Integration into Behavioral Health.
Washington’s health care community wants to understand where our state is with advancing clinical integration of physician and behavioral health.
- What does it mean to be integrated?
- What providers are integrated and at what levels?
- Where are we now – statewide benchmark?
- What is needed to support providers in advancing integration?
- How to we track integration improvements over time (in practices, regional and statewide)?
- How do we link level of integration to patient outcomes?
The Washington Integrated Care Assessment (WA-ICA) will help our community begin to address these questions and support our providers' journey in advancing integration.
The WA-ICA includes two companion tools, one tailored to primary care and one tailored to behavioral health (mental health and substance use disorder) settings. The tools will help providers track, measure, and advance their clinical integration progress across a set of domains. These domains include:
- Screening, referral to care, and follow up
- Ongoing care management
- Information exchange among providers
- A multi-disciplinary team (including patients) with dedicated time
- Self-management support adapted to patient
- Systematic quality improvement
- Linkages to community and social services
- Sustainability
- Who was involved in the development of the WA-ICA?
-
The Integration Assessment Workgroup, a collaboration of ACHs, MCOs, and HCA, worked together to identify the WA-ICA and create an implementation plan.
The following organizations support the Washington Integrated Care Assessment (WA-ICA):
Washington State Health Care Authority
Community Health Plan of Washington
- Which version is best for my site?
-
The WA-ICA is designed for outpatient primary care and behavioral health sites (including SUD providers). If your site primarily provides primary care (physical health or medical) services, consider using the primary care version of the assessment. If your site primarily provides behavioral health (mental health and/or SUD) services, consider using the behavioral health version of the assessment.
- How long will the assessment take?
-
It should take your care team approximately 3-4 hours in total to complete (including assessment team discussion). It is meant to be completed as an interdisciplinary team. For more detail about how to approach the assessment please look at our FAQ and other supporting materials on the appropriate 'guidance' page for your site.
- Copies of the assessment tools
- History and background
-
The Health Care Authority has an excellent resource page with background information and a detailed FAQ about the history of the WA-ICA transition effort, including how the WA-ICA was developed and why it was selected.