The Results Are In: Why Primary Care Must Integrate Behavioral Health Now

As a healthcare founder, I spend a lot of time paying attention to what’s happening in U.S. healthcare and what I’ve come to understand is that our industry is failing everyone: patients, providers, and practices alike. I would find it hard to believe that anyone would say we are “winning” when it comes to providing effective, accessible, and affordable services to most Americans, which is frustrating at best.

With nearly a decade of leadership in this space, I can definitively say that this is especially true in behavioral health. There aren’t enough therapists. Appointments are booked weeks or even months out. And for many patients, treatment is simply unaffordable.

Over time, primary care teams absorbed the impact and became the de facto mental health provider. Without bandwidth, specialty training, team-based support, and reliable referrals, there’s only so much they can do. It threatens clinical outcomes, the frontline’s well-being, and the total cost of care.

The healthcare system accepts this. We shouldn’t. Together, we must fundamentally change how we deliver whole-patient care. It starts in primary care.

The Only Path Forward is Integrated Care

Over 10 years ago, my co-founder Steve Biljan and I saw firsthand how PCPs were being set up to fail. They were expected to manage increasingly complex behavioral health caseloads without the right support or infrastructure to do it well.

That’s why we founded evolvedMD. We enhanced the AIMS Collaborative Care Model (CoCM) with an onsite, team-based approach to help primary care teams deliver measurable outcomes, support their providers, and drive significant cost savings.

Today, We Have Validated, Real-world Data to Prove It

Despite 20 years’ worth of evidence-based research, nationwide CoCM adoption still lags with enormous disparities among states. One of the biggest barriers we see is education. Primary care leaders, understandably, need real-world proof that Collaborative Care meets the unique needs of their patients, providers, and practices.

We took this task to heart, had our CoCM approach independently valuated by a leading healthcare actuarial firm, and produced our first-ever white paper with results.

What Our First White Paper Actually Shows

Partnering with a nationally recognized healthcare actuarial consulting firm, we took a good hard look at what matters most to primary care teams we meet:

• Patient Impact – Clinical outcomes.
• Provider Impact– Engagement and service utilization.
• Practice Impact – Total cost of care savings.

The findings were clear. Measured against traditional behavioral health and other integrated models, evolvedMD’s approach achieves:

• 15% lower risk-adjusted total cost of care – Including patients with medical co-morbidities like diabetes or heart disease.
• 15% fewer psychiatric professional visits – Addresses mental health concerns earlier, reduces unnecessary referrals, and keeps treatment anchored in primary care clinics.
• 17% stronger patient–primary care provider (PCP) relationships – Strengthens trust and care continuity. PCPs can strictly focus on physical health care and leave behavioral health to us.
• 3–4x more PCP referrals for onsite Collaborative Care Model services – Having immediate access to onsite behavioral health resources reduces delays and drop-offs.

Download our white paper and see for yourself.

These Findings Validate What We’ve Long Believed

Collaborative Care is the best way to increase access, improve outcomes, and lower the total cost of care—even when treating medically complex and risk-based populations. evolvedMD’s integrated, team-based, and outcomes-driven approach model is the gold standard.

Primary Care Leaders: It’s Time to Answer Some Critical Questions

• Is behavioral health support available at your practice?
• If not, are you relying on community referrals?
• Are you measuring patient outcomes over time, or simply managing volume?
• Are your PCPs supported by a care team, or stretched beyond capacity?
• Do you truly understand how behavioral health is impacting your financial performance and total cost of care?

If the answer to any of these is “Not yet,” the status quo is already costing your team and your patients more than you think.

To start the conversation now, reach out to me at erik.osland@evolvedmd.com