Directs care
Assesses patients, makes treatment decisions, prescribes, and coordinates medical care and specialty referrals.
For Washington primary care clinics
Psychiatric expertise.
A partner for your primary care team.
Caring Minds LLC offers remote psychiatric consultation within the Collaborative Care Model, helping your team care for patients with depression, anxiety, and other appropriate behavioral health concerns.
For medical directors, practice administrators, and behavioral health leaders.
The Collaborative Care Model
More support within primary care.
Collaborative Care (CoCM) connects the primary care provider, a behavioral health care manager, and a psychiatric consultant. Together, they follow a defined patient population, track progress with validated symptom measures, and adjust treatment when patients are not improving.
The PCP continues to direct treatment and prescribe. The care manager maintains regular patient contact. Caring Minds provides psychiatric recommendations through systematic caseload review.
Maintains the connection
Engages patients, offers brief evidence-based interventions, tracks symptoms and treatment response, and maintains the registry.
Adds psychiatric guidance
Reviews prioritized cases with the care manager and recommends diagnostic clarification, treatment changes, monitoring, or specialty evaluation.
What Caring Minds provides
A defined psychiatric consultation service.
Work with a psychiatric mental health nurse practitioner through a professional services agreement tailored to your team’s needs and available capacity.
Weekly caseload review
Scheduled review of new patients, worsening symptoms, and patients who are not progressing toward treatment goals.
Diagnostic and medication guidance
Recommendations informed by treatment history, symptom measures, medication response, tolerability, and relevant medical factors.
Written next steps
Documented recommendations for the treating provider, including monitoring, reassessment, and when to consider direct specialty care.
Ongoing team consultation
Consultation between scheduled reviews and clinical quality discussions within agreed hours, response times, and scope.
The consultant role generally involves advising your team rather than directly seeing patients or prescribing. Direct psychiatric evaluations, if available and appropriate, require separate arrangements.
Implementation resources
Build your program with experienced support.
For clinics developing or expanding CoCM, the University of Washington AIMS Center offers implementation coaching, team training, workflow and financing guidance, and program evaluation support.
Your clinic can contract directly with AIMS for fee-based support. AIMS determines the scope, availability, timeline, and pricing. Caring Minds can participate in agreed clinical planning while providing the ongoing psychiatric consultant service through a separate agreement.
Your clinic operates the program. AIMS supports implementation; Caring Minds supplies psychiatric consultation.
Caring Minds LLC is an independent practice. It is not affiliated with or endorsed by the University of Washington AIMS Center.
A practical partnership
Clear roles from the beginning.
Your clinic brings
- A PCP champion and engaged clinical leadership.
- A qualified behavioral health care manager.
- A patient registry and shared documentation workflows.
- Patient enrollment, consent, follow-up, and safety procedures.
- Billing, payer verification, and program operations.
We plan together
- Explore fit. Discuss your population, current services, staffing, and consultation needs.
- Prepare the team. Define clinical workflows, agreements, communication, and implementation support.
- Begin and evaluate. Start with agreed capacity, hold regular case reviews, and monitor progress.
Questions from clinic teams
Before we begin.
Can we partner if we already offer behavioral health services?
Yes. We can explore whether additional psychiatric consultation, caseload review, or coverage would complement your current model. Existing services and consultant arrangements guide the discussion.
What if we do not have a care manager yet?
A qualified behavioral health care manager is a core part of CoCM. Your clinic would need to hire or contract that role and establish the program workflows before launch. UW AIMS implementation support can help your team plan these steps.
Does Caring Minds implement the entire program?
Caring Minds offers the psychiatric consultant specialty service. Your clinic remains responsible for program operations and can contract separately with UW AIMS for implementation coaching and training.
Who pays for consultation and implementation?
The clinic contracts with Caring Minds for psychiatric consultation and separately with AIMS for any implementation services. Clinic reimbursement for CoCM depends on payer coverage, documentation, staffing, and other applicable requirements. Fees and scope are discussed during partnership planning.
Does the consultant take over prescribing or crisis coverage?
In the consultation model, the treating PCP retains prescribing and treatment responsibilities. Urgent communication, escalation, and backup arrangements are defined before launch. Caring Minds does not provide an emergency response service.
Let’s explore the fit
Bring psychiatric consultation to your team.
Tell us about your clinic, the population you serve, and your current behavioral health services. Please do not include patient information in an initial email.