Ep. #100 Messy Integrated Care: Models & Fidelity

In the 100th episode of the Integrated Care Podcast from the Collaborative Family Healthcare Association, host Grace Pratt and co-hosts Bridget Beachy, Monica Williams, Neftali Serrano, Jen Thomas, and Ashley Garrison celebrate the milestone, share the podcast’s origins, and highlight CFHA’s upcoming integrated care conference in St. Louis in early October. They revisit the long-running topic of integrated care models and discuss why many clinical sites cannot run PCBH, Collaborative Care, or other approaches to strict fidelity due to real-world constraints like staffing, resources, policy, and local context. The group emphasizes focusing on core tenets, shared language, and the “spirit” of integrated care rather than rigid prescriptions, noting that descriptive norms (e.g., typical visit counts) should not become exclusionary rules. The episode closes with Donna Ashworth’s poem “Ducks in a Row” as an ode to embracing messiness.