Primary Care Champion: Alin Severance, MD, UPMC Health Plan

The Primary Care Collaborative (PCC) is thrilled to recognize Dr. Alin Severance, Medical Director of Behavioral Health Services at UPMC Health Plan and Associate Medical Director at Community Care Behavioral Health, as its latest Primary Care Champion. Dr. Severance also serves as the co-chair of the PCC Behavioral Health Integration Workgroup.

In an interview with the PCC, Dr. Severance, a psychiatrist with experience in behavioral health crisis services and academic medical settings, highlighted the challenges of fragmented care and the importance of integrating behavioral and physical health.

He emphasized the strong link between mental and physical health, noting that fragmented care and stigma often prevent effective treatment. Dr. Severance also emphasized that behavioral health was a core component of delivering care — and advocated for integrating behavioral health into primary care to improve outcomes, reduce stigma, and ensure early, seamless treatment.

Dr. Severance then highlighted a successful Pennsylvania model integrating primary care into behavioral health settings and stresses the need for payers to adapt payment models that encourage integration. He called for upfront investments and streamlined billing to support sustainable, high-quality integrated care that benefits both patients and providers.

Dr. Severance also stressed two key messages for policymakers.

First, he cited the urgent need to accelerate the implementation of proven care models, noting that it often takes a decade for best practices to become widely adopted. For example, the collaborative care model, shown to improve outcomes and reduce costs, still sees slow adoption despite decades of evidence.

Second, he advocated for integrating training in primary care settings for all residents in family medicine, internal medicine, pediatrics, and psychiatry. Exposure to integrated care during training fosters continued use and helps expand access to these effective models.

Finally, when asked what changes he wished America’s health care system could implement overnight, Dr. Severance envisioned a system where high-quality, comprehensive primary care that includes behavioral health treatment was the expectation, not the exception.