Including the family in research evaluating integrated care: A call for expanding investigators' scope beyond single-person measures

As providers across the fields of behavioral- and biomedical- care advance efforts to include patients' families in the care that they provide, we must also include families in the research that we conduct. Additional knowledge about families in treatment could help us screen families at risk for poor outcomes, design more appropriate family based interventions, and more completely assess the impact(s) of interventions on both patients and their families. In this account, we outline assessments that are useful in responding to this call. We consider tools that target general family functioning, that are sensitive to change and progress, and that are adaptable to common time- and administrative- constraints within medical settings. We highlight strengths and weaknesses within the pool of measures that are currently available, and offer suggestions and next-steps in instrument-design and development.