Comprehensive Care for Complex Patients: The Medical-Psychiatric Coordinating Physician Method
Cambridge University Press, 2012
To read an excerpt from the first chapter, click here.
About Comprehensive Care for Complex Patients
“Complex patients” are a sizeable population who generally require disproportionate attention for their management and respond poorly to treatment. Their systemic medical, psychiatric and personal needs have a tendency to drain or exceed the capabilities of those who treat them whilst overutilizing health care resources. As this patient population grows, we move ever closer to a crisis in health care delivery. This volume presents an innovative team-based approach for assessing and managing diagnostically complex and management intensive patients. The physician-led “Medical-Psychiatric Coordinating Physician” (MPCP) model not only improves patient treatment, but also provides for the containment of costs by reducing redundancy and curbing excess in the use of services. Other benefits include improved diagnostic accuracy and decision making, as well as better communication among physicians and allied health professionals. This book is essential reading for psychiatrists, primary care physicians, and physicians, directors and administrators working in multidisciplinary specialty clinics.
What Others Say about Comprehensive Care for Complex Patients
“Today, organized medicine struggles with the disorganized havoc that complicated patients routinely wreak on the efficiency of systematized, evidence-based, protocolized, ultimately simplistic practice approaches. Models that embrace complexity are needed. For those of us laboring to make sense of the clinical maelstroms within which we spin – too often in isolation – this book offers ideas and reassurance to help master the storm rather than founder in its vortex. It provides a cerebral roadmap for overwhelmed and desperate clinicians striving to blaze sensible trails through senseless systems of care.”
~ J. Michael Bostwick, MD, Professor of Psychiatry, Mayo Clinic, USA
“With this book, these experienced clinicians propose a very innovative model of clinical medical-psychiatric work with complex patients. The MPCP model identifies, structures, and integrates the key elements needed to comprehensively understand the diagnostic and therapeutic aspects pertinent to efficiently and collaboratively approach a patient’s medical-psychiatric condition. Not only do the authors present the model, they also guide the reader step by step through the implementation process, its essential phases, pitfalls, and risks.”
~ Fabien Gagnon MD, DPsy, CCFP, CSPQ, FRCPC, FCFP, DFAPA, DFCPA, FAPM
Co-founder of the Canadian Academy of Psychosomatic Medicine, Professor,
Head of the Division of Consultation-Liaison Psychiatry and Psychosomatic Medicine,
Department of Psychiatry and Neurosciences, Universite Laval, Quebec, Canada
“Doctors Frankel, Bourgeois, and Erdberg’s detailed and honest book deliberately exposes an embarrassing secret – that medical care in our society is unnecessarily divided. With decades of clinical experience each, they quietly encourage a revolution in the way we practice medicine. Why accept the artificial schism between mind and body when integration of care is so intuitive and effective? The “MPCP” model suggests that, rather than limiting ourselves by self-imposed boundaries, physicians, particularly psychiatrists, explore the full spectrum of a patient’s mental and physical health, utilizing “truing” measures that enable us to judge our work by concrete results.”
~ Debra Kahn, MD, Assistant Clinical Professor, Department of Psychiatry and
Behavioral Sciences and Director, Psychosomatic Medicine Service,
University of California at Davis, Sacramento, CA, USA
