The NC-ACCEPT Project
Project Description
North Carolina's four academic departments of psychiatry are keenly aware that physicians in North Carolina share a responsibility to serve as good stewards of the state's health care resources, particularly in the present climate of extraordinary economic adversity. In 2011, the psychiatric departments of The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and East Carolina, Duke, and Wake Forest Universities partnered in an effort to change prescribing trends to improve psychiatric care and save money.
This partnership, The North Carolina Academic Consortium for Cost Effective Psychopharmacologic Treatment (NC-ACCEPT), is leveraging education campaigns to change prescribing trends for specific diagnoses, among them sleep disorders, depression, and treatment-resistant depression. Funded by NC Community Care, this education effort will train department psychiatric professionals to disseminate the same training to others, thus quickly creating a mechanism for broad knowledge distribution to stakeholders regarding evidence-based, cost-effective prescribing practices.
During the period of the grant, each department of psychiatry will annually make 12 presentations in its region to stakeholder audiences, including CABHAs and CCNC/primary care groups. The presentations will be a mix of live events and webinars that are coordinated with regional LMEs, CABHA medical directors, and CCNC psychiatric consultants. Southern Regional AHEC is assisting NC-ACCEPT in coordinating events, designing training materials, and developing this website. Education materials developed for the project will be posted on this website.
iCARE.org Resources
The NC iCARE project created a website that is broad in scope and rich in resources for healthcare professionals. The resources of iCAREnc.org are updated and maintained by the NC Center of Excellence for Integrated Care, a project of the NC Foundation for Advanced Health Programs. The following sections of the iCARE website are especially recommended.