Primary Care for Psychiatry Patients | Conditions & Treatments

Overview

The Medicine in Psychiatry Service–Primary Care office (MIPS-PC) cares for patients 18 and older with severe mental illnesses (such as schizophrenia and schizoaffective and bipolar disorders) who have little or no engagement in traditional outpatient medical care or who would benefit from a tailored medical approach that takes their psychiatric illness into account.

Referral sources include community-based psychiatrists, primary care physicians, behavioral health professionals (including from within the Department of Psychiatry) and discharging physicians from the closely affiliated inpatient MIPS medical unit at URMC.

While providing full-spectrum primary care services, MIPS physicians also provide psychiatric care and mental health counseling to a limited number of patients who are stable on their psychiatric medication regimens.

UR Medicine's Approach

As your medical home, we’re the first place you can go for all your health-care needs.

We learn about you. We get to know you and the details of your life that affect your health and well-being. Knowing your health history helps us create a care plan as unique as you are.

We communicate with you. We stay in touch, when you’re sick and when you’re healthy. Our goal is to create a long-standing relationship with you and your family based on clear and open communication.

We guide you. We work with you to set goals for your health and help you reach them step-by-step.

What Sets Us Apart?

We’re an accredited, patient-centered medical home. Through a team of medical experts in primary care and mental health, we’re here to help you when you’re ill but also to provide you with the information you need to make healthy choices. Your medical team will consist of a primary care physician, a nurse practitioner, nurses, and mental health providers. Our goal is to create a longstanding relationship with you and your family based on clear and open communication.

Teaching and learning: As part of an academic medical center, we have an important role in teach future healthcare providers. At times residents and students of different disciplines will be working under your provider’s supervision. We believe this educational involvement improves your care.

A unique part of our MIPS program is a 20-bed Inpatient Medicine in Psychiatry Unit (IMIP). Here, patients receive combined medical and mental health care during serious health difficulties that require hospitalization.