Welcome to Medical Behavioral Health Solutions
A consultative service offering guidance and support to assess, develop and integrate behavioral health into your medical settings.
Pediatric Meltdown Podcast
Tune in to Pediatric Meltdown with Lia Gaggino and listen to experts provide insights and strategies on a wide variety of behavioral health and mental topics anytime and anywhere that fits your busy schedule. Guests include published researches, primary care colleagues, therapists, educators, parents and even patients.
My Philosophy
“Medical Behavioral Health Solutions LLC, offers a wide variety of strategies and training to build a robust integrated behavioral health program in outpatient settings including private and hospital system owned practices, academic settings, and Federally Qualified Health Care clinics.” –
Dr. Lia Gaggino
Integrated Behavioral Health
Integrated behavioral health (IBH) is a fast-growing innovation that places mental health professionals in primary care practices where they function as a part of the medical team. These mental health professionals provide onsite assessments, brief intervention and coordinate care with the providers and any other outside professionals who may be needed.
Behavioral health concerns make up almost one third of the reasons why patients come to primary care practices. With limited access to adult and child and adolescent psychiatry services, providing mental health care often falls to primary care who may have limited training in behavioral health and feel that they are not adequately prepared to provide those services.
Building an IBH practice requires a thoughtful needs assessment, clear policies and procedures, and a knowledge of billing and coding to support the IBH model. MBHS offers this consulting expertise, bridging the gap between mental health professionals and primary care providers, thus guiding you through the assessment and development process before you hire IBH services.
Meet Lia
I have worked as a pediatrician for over 30 years on the west side of Michigan. During my career as a primary care physician, I have been privileged to care for children and adolescents, and know that their success is closely tied to mental wellness. Parents rely on healthcare providers to be the go-to professionals when it comes to concerns about their children and we need to be experts in behavioral health.
Knowing that the emotional well-being of children is at the core of their total health, I have collaborated with other professionals to develop processes and protocols to strengthen our cross-disciplinary diagnostic and behavioral healthcare models.
I have been fortunate to work within a hospital environment where collaboration was encouraged. When given the opportunity to collaborate with other healthcare professionals, we have always come to a better, more comprehensive care solution for our patients.
It is this kind of cross-disciplinary collaboration that I hope to bring to healthcare and educational environments so that behavioral health care will be fully integrated into their patient care protocols.
For more information about my professional life, you can review my curriculum vitae by clicking here.
On a personal note, my husband Rodger and I have resided in Kalamazoo since we married. We have raised two lovely and talented daughters and we are proud of the work they do as young professional women.
Professional Services
Dr. Lia Gaggino is offering consultative guidance and support to integrate behavioral health into your medical setting. How can your organization take advantage of this expertise?
Speaking
Opportunities
Educational programming in areas of expertise, including: latest trend research, successful intervention examples, and methods to establish protocols:
- Suicide risk assessment and prevention strategies
- Integrating mental health into your medical practice
- Establishing collaborative relationships between healthcare and mental health organizations and breaking down the silos between these communities.
Site Consultation/Program Development
- Evaluate your current suicide prevention policies, procedures and workflow
- Implement mental health screening, assessment and management strategies
- Design custom processes for your environment using evidence-based tools and best practices.
Perspective
Audiences
Cross-disciplinary collaboration has proven to be one of the most helpful tactics when assisting patients with behavioral health issues. Any audience interested in mental health integration could benefit from a medical perspective when establishing processes and procedures for mental-health issue early detection, referrals and case-management:
- Academic environments
- Community mental health sites
- Family Medicine practices
- Federally qualified health centers (FQHC)
- Hospitals
- Medical residency programs
- Mental health/therapy practices
- Non-profit organizations
- Private pediatric practices.