Improving Schizophrenia Care

Help to promote recovery and improve the lives of people with schizophrenia and their families: that’s what the people at the Best Practices in Schizophrenia Treatment (BeST) Center at NEOMED do every day through their national leadership. One of the BeST Center’s signature initiatives is the FIRST program, which provides coordinated specialty care for First Episode Psychosis—that is, when a person first experiences psychotic symptoms that may be the initial warning sign of schizophrenia.

The Margaret Clark Morgan Foundation, whose philanthropy founded the BeST Center, has partnered with The Thomas Scattergood Behavioral Health Foundation to publish a new scholarly series of papers designed to inform public policy regarding a variety of topics in behavioral health. NEOMED’s Mark Munetz, M.D., The Margaret Clark Morgan Foundation Endowed Chair in Psychiatry at the University’s College of Medicine, notes the significance of one of these papers, “Coordinated Specialty Care for First-Episode Psychosis: An Example of Financing for Specialty Programs [PDF]” by Lisa Dixon, M.D., M.P.H., which directly relates to the BeST Center’s national leadership through its FIRST program.

Dr. Munetz co-authored “Improving Outcomes for People with Serious Mental Illness and Co-Occurring Substance Use Disorders in Contact with the Criminal Justice System,” one of the six papers in the just-published Spring 2017 series.