Public-Academic Partnerships: A Program to Improve the Quality of Antipsychotic Prescribing in a Community Mental Health System

State mental health authorities can use public-academic partnerships to create professional roles in which leaders can track trends, identify problems, and carry out quality improvement projects to address key issues. Leaders with positions in both academic institutions and state mental health authorities ensure access to resources, technical expertise, and key relationships to improve quality. The authors describe a public-academic partnership in New Hampshire and a quality improvement program it carried out. The program encourages providers at community mental health centers to adopt prescribing practices that limit the cardiometabolic side effects of antipsychotic medicines. (Psychiatric Services 62:1004–1006, 2011)