Session: Integrating Health and Social Services: Implications for the Affordable Care Act (Society for Social Work and Research 23rd Annual Conference - Ending Gender Based, Family and Community Violence)

Passage of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) is generating changes in the financing, organization and accessibility of health and social services in the United States. The focus on integrated models of service delivery offers unprecedented opportunities to understand and improve the integration of health, behavioral health and social services at both the system- and service- levels. A focus on integrated service additionally enables the development of interventions aimed at effectively addressing social needs as they relate to health. This symposium will bring together analyses of service delivery models that have been implemented across health care settings and examine their prevalence, their organizational and service characteristics and their impact on client outcomes. Social workers have been actively engaged in the study of comprehensive, integrated care models (specifically, models that bring together health, mental health and social services to coordinate care and improve outcomes) typically under rubrics of integrated services, comprehensive services, wrap around services, and intensive case management. This symposium is designed to articulate distinctions among models and to identify integrated social service delivery strategies that may have greatest impact on client outcomes.

The symposium will draw on studies of integrated health and social service interventions that derive from two systematic reviews (one of the integration of behavioral health and primary care and one of social services and health care) as well as a study of organizational and service factors affecting the provision of integrated care in an emergency department.

All papers in the symposium will address the following three questions:

(1) What are the organizational and service factors that characterize successful service integration efforts? (2) What specific components of service integration models have a positive impact on client outcomes? (3) What are implications for developing integration strategies that increase accessibility and effectiveness in the context of the Affordable Care Act.