Integrated Care & Patient Navigators for Latinos With Serious Mental Illness

Latinos with serious mental illnesses have an inordinately high rate of physical illness leading to a significantly shortened life. One reason is the difficulty in engaging this disenfranchised group in primary care. Integrated services through community-based outreach and care coordination are an innovative and evidence-based practice that improves physical health. Unfortunately, social determinants of health for Latinos are often a barrier to participation in integrated care. Peer navigators offer a strategy that might help members of this group. Peer navigators, in this study, are Latinos with past history of serious mental illness specially trained to help patients meet their health needs. The program will be developed through community-based participatory research (CBPR) representing a hands-on partnership between investigators and a community advisory board made up of patient partners. Given this, investigators aim to do the following. (1) Develop a peer navigator program meant to enhance the impact of already existing integrated services for Latinos with serious mental illness. (2) Using an experimental design, test the impact of peer navigators, compared to existing integrated services alone, on engagement of Latinos with serious mental illness in primary care services. This includes indices of care seeking, appointments, and satisfaction with engagement. Investigators expect these indices to be higher in the group with peer navigators. (3) Determine the comparative impact of peer navigators versus integrated-care-as-usual on subsequent health. Investigators expect to show physical health improvement with the greater engagement observed in the peer navigator group. Investigators expect a similar improvement in mental health and quality of life as physical health concerns are diminished. This proposal represents the partnership between researchers from the Center on Adherence and Self-Determination (a National Institute of Mental Health-funded Center dedicated to understanding service engagement among people with serious mental illness and their health care system) and Trilogy. Consistent with other projects, investigators will develop a Community Advisory Board to conduct CBPR and complete a mixed-methods research project to inform the peer navigator program. Based on a power-analysis, investigators will recruit 100 Latinos with serious mental illness who will complete baseline measures of physical health, mental health, service use and engagement in the previous year, quality of life, and current housing/employment status. Patients will then be randomized to an existing integrated care program for Hispanic/Latinos with mental illness with or without peer navigators for one year. Measures will be repeated at 4, 8, and 12 months.