Behavioral Health Integration Capacity Assessment

Date: February 29, 2024
Time to read: 2 minutes.

Resources for Integrated Care updated the Behavioral Health Integration Capacity Assessment (BHICA) Guide and interactive BHICA Tool, originally published in 2014, to help organizations that provide behavioral health services evaluate their capacity to offer integrated primary care services. The BHICA Guide and BHICA Tool are unique among similar resources in that they explicitly address behavioral health and primary care integration for individuals dually eligible for Medicare and Medicaid. They offer behavioral health organizations strategies to:

  • Better serve dually eligible individuals
  • Understand how their current organizational infrastructure could support further integration
  • Assess organizational strengths and challenges in implementing integration
  • Set and prioritize integration goals for the organization

The revised BHICA Guide includes updated context for integration, informed by the HHS Roadmap for Behavioral Health Integration, the CMS Framework for Health Equity, and other integration frameworks and tools. It includes enhanced user guidance and instructions for the interactive scoring BHICA Tool. Finally, the BHICA Guide includes vetted resources to support integration efforts, including existing quality improvement resources.  

Downloadable Version of the BHICA

Click the following links to download the two parts of the BHICA:

  1. BHICA Guide: Offers background, context, and guidance on completing the assessment using the BHICA Tool.
  2. BHICA Tool: Offers questions and interactive scoring that providers can use to either assess readiness for or evaluate progress on behavioral health and primary care integration.

Intended Audience

The target audience for the BHICA Guide and BHICA Tool includes care providers that are either considering or actively planning to improve integration of primary care into their existing behavioral health care delivery system. Such care providers include behavioral health and primary care clinicians and administrators, behavioral health organizations, Federally Qualified Health Centers, Certified Community Behavioral Health Clinics, community organizations, and other behavioral health service providers.

Related Resources

Information regarding the webinar conducted to introduce the BHICA in 2014 is available here.