Learnings of having Embedded Psychiatrists in Neurological Clinics

Neuro Pathways Podcast Series

Release Date: October 1, 2026
Expiration Date: September 30, 2027

Estimated Time of Completion: 30 minutes

The Impact of Embedded Psychiatry in Neurological Care

Drew Cumming, MD

Description

Each podcast in the Neurological Institute series provides a brief, review of management strategies related to the topic.

Learning Objectives

• Review up to date and clinically pertinent topics related to neurological disease
• Discuss advances in the field of neurological diseases
• Describe options for the treatment and care of various neurological disease

Target Audience

Physicians and Advanced Practice providers in Family Practice, Internal Medicine & Subspecialties, Neurology, Nursing, Pediatrics, Psychology/Psychiatry, Radiology as well as Professors, Researchers, and Students.

Accreditation

In support of improving patient care, Cleveland Clinic Center for Continuing Education is jointly accredited by the Accreditation Council for Continuing Medical Education (ACCME), the Accreditation Council for Pharmacy Education (ACPE), and the American Nurses Credentialing Center (ANCC), to provide continuing education for the healthcare team.

CREDIT DESIGNATION

• American Medical Association (AMA)
  Cleveland Clinic Center for Continuing Education designates this enduring material for a maximum of 0.50 AMA PRA Category 1 Credits™. Physicians should claim only the credit commensurate with the extent of their participation in the activity.
  Participants claiming CME credit from this activity may submit the credit hours to the American Osteopathic Association for Category 2 credit.
• American Nurses Credentialing Center (ANCC)
  Cleveland Clinic Center for Continuing Education designates this enduring material for a maximum of 0.50 ANCC contact hours.
• Certificate of Participation
  A certificate of participation will be provided to other health care professionals for requesting credits in accordance with their professional boards and/or associations.
• American Board of Surgery (ABS)
  Successful completion of this CME activity enables the learner to earn credit toward the CME requirements of the American Board of Surgery’s Continuous Certification program. It is the CME activity provider's responsibility to submit learner completion information to ACCME for the purpose of granting ABS credit.

Credit will be reported within 30 days of claiming credit.

Podcast Series Director

Andreas Alexopoulos, MD, MPH
Epilepsy Center

Additional Planner/Reviewer

Ari Newman, BSN

Faculty

Drew Cumming, MD
Center for Adult Behavioral Health

Host

Glen Stevens, DO, PhD
Cleveland Clinic Brain Tumor and Neuro-Oncology Center

Agenda

The Impact of Embedded Psychiatry in Neurological Care
Drew Cumming, MD

Disclosures

In accordance with the Standards for Integrity and Independence issued by the Accreditation Council for Continuing Medical Education (ACCME), The Cleveland Clinic Center for Continuing Education mitigates all relevant conflicts of interest to ensure CME activities are free of commercial bias.

The following faculty have indicated that they may have a relationship, which in the context of their presentation(s), could be perceived as a potential conflict of interest:

Glen Stevens, DO, PhD

All other individuals have indicated no relationship which, in the context of their involvement, could be perceived as a potential conflict of interest.

CME Disclaimer

The information in this educational activity is provided for general medical education purposes only and is not meant to substitute for the independent medical judgment of a physician relative to diagnostic and treatment options of a specific patient's medical condition. The viewpoints expressed in this CME activity are those of the authors/faculty. They do not represent an endorsement by The Cleveland Clinic Foundation. In no event will The Cleveland Clinic Foundation be liable for any decision made or action taken in reliance upon the information provided through this CME activity.

HOW TO OBTAIN AMA PRA Category 1 Credits™, ANCC Contact Hours, OR CERTIFICATE OF PARTICIPATION:

Go to: Neuro Pathways Podcast October 1, 2026 to log into myCME and begin the activity evaluation and print your certificate If you need assistance, contact the CME office at myCME@ccf.org.

Copyright ©2026 The Cleveland Clinic Foundation. All Rights Reserved.

Introduction:

Neuro Pathways, a Cleveland Clinic podcast exploring the latest research discoveries and clinical advances in the fields of neurology, neurosurgery, neuro rehab, and psychiatry.

Dr. Glen Stevens, DO, PhD:

Behavioral health is an important aspect of neurological care. Many patients with neurological disorders experience psychiatric symptoms that require specialized expertise and a collaborative approach to treatment. In this episode of Neuro Pathways, we discuss what we've learned from embedding psychiatrists within neurological clinics and the value of multidisciplinary care. I'm your host, Glen Stevens, neurologist, neuro-oncologist in Cleveland Clinic's Neurological Institute. And joining me today is Dr. Drew Cumming. Dr. Cumming is a neuropsychiatrist in Cleveland Clinic's Neurological Institute's Department of Psychiatry and Psychology. Drew, welcome to Neuro Pathways.

Dr. Drew Cumming, MD:

Thank you for having me.

Dr. Glen Stevens, DO, PhD:

So Drew, we haven't met before, but already I love you because I'm Canadian, you're Canadian, so we always have a Canadian love fest on these podcasts. So tell me a little bit more about yourself and for our audience, where you came from, your training, and what you do here at the Cleveland Clinic.

Dr. Drew Cumming, MD:

Sure. Well, I'm Canadian, but all of my training was down here. I did the majority of my residency at Georgetown. I switched over to the NIH for my fourth year to do some training in clinical research. And then I followed that with a fellowship in consultation liaison psychiatry at Mass General before coming over here to Cleveland.

Dr. Glen Stevens, DO, PhD:

I was sitting in my office before I came over. I was just finishing up a case and I was looking up at the wall and I saw my board certification up there. And it doesn't say board certified in neuro or that type of thing. It says board certified in psychiatry and neurology.

Dr. Drew Cumming, MD:

The APBN. Yes.

Dr. Glen Stevens, DO, PhD:

Yes. So I think that all neurologists should be better at psychiatry than they are since it's actually the first part of the board certification that goes through. And of course, as you know, on the neuro side, there's a lot of psychiatry on the boards and on the psych side, there's a lot of neurology on the board.

Dr. Drew Cumming, MD:

There is. And I think most-

Dr. Glen Stevens, DO, PhD:

You shouldn't have to be here to discuss this, right? We should be naturally ready.

Dr. Drew Cumming, MD:

Well, don't talk me out of a job just yet.

Dr. Glen Stevens, DO, PhD:

It seems obvious, but what led the Cleveland Clinic to embed psychiatrist within neurologic clinics and what clinical gaps was this model designed to address?

Dr. Drew Cumming, MD:

Well, having a psychiatrist consult with a different specialty is nothing new. That's the basis of my whole fellowship in that field. Here at the Clinic, far before I was here, George Tesar, he was here for many years working in the EMU and the field of consultation liaison psychiatry or CL, that's much easier. Most of that's inpatient, but as we all know, the majority of patient care happens in the clinic setting. So embedding a psychiatrist in another field in other specialties clinic, it just makes sense because we offer a fresh set of eyes and especially in neurology, where there's such a greater prevalence of psychiatric burden, I think we can offer a lot, not only to the physicians, but to their patients.

Dr. Glen Stevens, DO, PhD:

Yeah. As a neuro-oncologist, this just seems so normal to me because we run multidisciplinary clinics all day long. We live, geographically, multidisciplinary. It's surgeons beside radiation oncologists, beside medical oncologists, neuro-oncologist. We all function together. So it's a very normal thing in the neuro-oncology field. So again, it shouldn't be a surprise. And I think that more multidisciplinary types of clinics is a good thing.

Dr. Drew Cumming, MD:

Absolutely. I think the benefit of having a specialized psychiatrist in your clinic is that one, it's going to reduce the wait time to helping your patients engage in mental health care. Two, for the psychiatrists themselves, we have training in neurology to some degree in our residency. As you pointed out, our board exams are one third neurological, but working with a particular patient population, you're able to develop a degree of expertise just based on repeated exposure. So when something comes up, you're used to understanding and recognizing what's typical. You come to appreciate what's atypical but does happen. And then you're also able to recognize when something just doesn't make sense and you have to do a little bit more digging.

Dr. Glen Stevens, DO, PhD:

Yeah. As you say, you can easily see the benefit of it. Patient comes in, they got a specific psychiatric related problem. I don't have a psychiatrist in clinic. I say to my nurse, "This patient needs to get in to," and then it just drags on and on and maybe sees, maybe doesn't see, the point maybe gets addressed, maybe doesn't get addressed. And one-stop shopping is always better, right? But as you can imagine, a lot of healthcare systems, certainly people in private practice, be a complicated model.

Dr. Drew Cumming, MD:

Yes, it is. And maybe this is my bias as a consult psychiatrist, but I think the collaboration is really a key component, especially when you're dealing with something like a complex neurological disorder because psychiatry, neurology, yes, we bicker, as siblings do, but we share the same organ. So there's no shortage of overlap in what we address.

Dr. Glen Stevens, DO, PhD:

Yeah. I don't know if you crossed it all, but I remember Kathy Franco was on the consult liaison service and I met her back in the mid-90s and was always a great source of help with patients in that regard. So I've always had a very close relationship with our psychiatric colleagues and the benefit that they can give our patients. So just to point out the scope of the problem, how common are psychiatric symptoms in neurologic disease? And you can be specific to diseases or just general.

Dr. Drew Cumming, MD:

So generally, very common. I don't have a lot of particular stats to give you right now, but certainly more common than in an otherwise healthy population. I can say, say for MS, in the healthy population, the lifetime prevalence of, let's say, major depressive disorder is going to be between 10 and 20%. In a patient with MS, any kind of MS here, the annual prevalence of major depressive disorder is 20%. Lifetime prevalence goes up to 50, and their relative risk of dying from suicide is 7.5. So just incredible burden of psychiatric symptoms there.

Dr. Glen Stevens, DO, PhD:

Yeah, I've discussed it on various podcasts before, but my mother had multiple sclerosis, which got me interested in the medicine. But I remember this was back, diagnosed in the '60s. So, as you can imagine, she was on the other side of things, where they just thought all her symptoms were psychiatric. I don't think she was truly having psychiatric-based problems then, but it took some time to diagnose this. And of course, time is brain, so the longer it takes. But back in the '60s, '70s, I mean, when I started, we could give people steroids for their multiple sclerosis, and if that didn't work, we could give them some more steroids. If that didn't work, some more steroids. The interferons, which were really the first drug that came out, these things weren't available. So on the other side of things, it's not like there was a lot of treatment options, but still there's a lot of pain and suffering and self-guilt and people looking at you a certain way and everybody just wants to know the actual diagnosis.

Dr. Drew Cumming, MD:

Yeah-

Dr. Glen Stevens, DO, PhD:

Tell me what I have and I can deal with it.

Dr. Drew Cumming, MD:

Sometimes it's that weight for that diagnosis that really weighs on them. But I think an additional benefit of having a psychiatrist working alongside neurologists is that you mentioned steroids, interferons. Those carry a lot of risk for mood issues, anxiety issues, certainly psychosis with steroids. I think we're handy in picking apart is this something from a primary psychiatric disorder or do we have to ease up a little bit on the steroids?

Dr. Glen Stevens, DO, PhD:

Yeah, I did a gamma knife case this week on a patient that informed me that when they had their surgery a number of years ago, they were on a lot of steroids and they got very psychotic on the steroids. So we had a long discussion about that. And then we had a discussion about could we do the treatment without using steroids this time? But these things are very beneficial, right? Then you can treat the patient properly if I'm asleep at the wheel or not paying attention, just give them the usual steroids like we do everybody. And then we're going to get a phone call a Friday night at 4:59, they're in the ED or the spouse is calling and the patient's raging and we want to hit things before they become a problem, right?

Dr. Drew Cumming, MD:

If you have a psychiatrist in your clinic, you can leave your office, walk down a few doors and say, "Hey, what are we going to do here?"

Dr. Glen Stevens, DO, PhD:

Yeah, that is the nice thing. And again, this is the exact model, right? Somebody comes in with a tumor, they expect one person's going to treat them, but you look and they obviously need surgery and you just lean to the person beside you and go, "Can you see this person today? I think they really need to have surgery." So all these things make sense, correct?

Dr. Drew Cumming, MD:

Absolutely. So currently I split my time, my clinical time. I have some of my time dedicated to inpatient consults for the neuro ICUs and their step-down units. And then in the clinic, I work alongside the movement disorder folks and the neuro autoimmune team as well.

Dr. Glen Stevens, DO, PhD:

I hate to admit it, but during my training, many times I remember you get called to see somebody with mental status change and I would say, "Don't we have psychiatrists that can see this? Why do I have to see this patient? Shouldn't the psychiatrist see this patient?" But of course there's just so much overlap with all these things and you have to rule out the medical causes for these.

Dr. Drew Cumming, MD:

Absolutely.

Dr. Glen Stevens, DO, PhD:

And then if not, then go the other direction. But it wasn't uncommon that the psychiatrist and the neurologist would bump into each other at the end of the bed on the same patient where they just pan consult.

Dr. Drew Cumming, MD:

Oh, well, and we diagnose them with delirium. You diagnose them with encephalopathy.

Dr. Glen Stevens, DO, PhD:

There you go. See, we just use a different letter in the alphabet. As you know though, our letter E is ahead of your letter D, so ...

Dr. Drew Cumming, MD:

Well, it's certainly reimbursed more.

Dr. Glen Stevens, DO, PhD:

Yeah. So that probably answers something. So you work mostly with Parkinson's patients, correct?

Dr. Drew Cumming, MD:

I do. That's a large proportion of my outpatient load with the Parkinson's folks.

Dr. Glen Stevens, DO, PhD:

So I'm sure there's a lot of folks out there listening that also deal with Parkinson's patients, but tell us a little bit about some of the neuropsychiatric issues associated with this population.

Dr. Drew Cumming, MD:

Well, certainly increased rates of depression and anxiety. With Parkinson's, up to 60% of them are going to experience psychosis to a certain degree, Parkinson's psychosis. It's a peculiar beast. From my perspective, very interesting. And I'll put it up there with significant apathy as probably the two most significant neuropsychiatric challenges that they'll face.

Dr. Glen Stevens, DO, PhD:

And is this a lot of Lewy body associated or not necessarily?

Dr. Drew Cumming, MD:

So Lewy body psychosis is similar, but also different. With Parkinson's, you certainly start to hallucinate if you add on extra dopaminergic medications, but also, as the disease progresses, you have changes in a certain serotonin receptor density in the cortex and how that influences glutamate transmission and the VTA, and you do end up with a centrally mediated psychotic process.

Dr. Glen Stevens, DO, PhD:

And what percentage of it is medication related versus disease related or it's hard to parse out?

Dr. Drew Cumming, MD:

I can't give you an exact number. I think the first time it happens for a patient with Parkinson's, most likely going to be medication mediated, especially if it starts in the days or weeks after a medication change. If it happens later on in the disease course and there hasn't been a change in their medications, their DBS settings, then perhaps more likely to be primary pathology.

Dr. Glen Stevens, DO, PhD:

So I'm a non-movement disorders physician, but let's say I'm managing a patient that also has Parkinson's disease. I'm not sure why that would be, but what should I know about ...

Dr. Drew Cumming, MD:

Well, if you really get stuck and you're stuck managing their depression, their psychosis, a lot of people, whether it's an adjunct in depression or you want to give them an antipsychotic, they're going to reach for the usual agents. But it's so important to avoid anything that's going to strongly inhibit dopamine action, whether that's a partial agonist like Aripiprazole or a full D2 antagonist, say like Olanzapine, Risperidone, that's going to put your patients at significant risk. At best, you're going to make their motor symptoms much worse. At worst, you're going to trigger, say, malignant catatonia or Parkinsonian-hyperpyrexia syndrome, and then your patient ends up in the ICU.

Dr. Glen Stevens, DO, PhD:

Yeah, I don't want to do any of those types of things, which is why I don't prescribe any medications, but I assume start one, go slow ...

Dr. Drew Cumming, MD:

Always.

Dr. Glen Stevens, DO, PhD:

See how it goes.

Dr. Drew Cumming, MD:

Yeah. There are three agents that we use. They're variably efficacious, but you can't go wrong by starting low, very low and going very, very slowly.

Dr. Glen Stevens, DO, PhD:

So what percentage of the Parkinson's patients here do you think the psychiatrists are assisting with or seeing? Is it 10%, 50%, 80%? I guess depends on where they are in their disease.

Dr. Drew Cumming, MD:

As many as our schedule can accommodate.

Dr. Glen Stevens, DO, PhD:

And tell me how the patients feel about, "Hey, I'm seeing a psychiatrist. Why am I seeing a psychiatrist?" How are the patients reacting to this?

Dr. Drew Cumming, MD:

You do get that reaction on occasion, but more often than not, I think they can appreciate the ways they've been suffering for a long time. And not to generalize, but maybe some of the older patients hold on to stigma related to mental health care. But if you're able to normalize their experience, talk about the way that their, say, Parkinson's disease influences their experience of anxiety, depression, why they're apathetic or even abulic, and you can give them a degree of understanding and hope, then it casts their experience in a different light. They're not crazy. They're experiencing something that actually the majority of patients with Parkinson's do.

Dr. Glen Stevens, DO, PhD:

Do we have any data to know how many hospitalizations we prevent or emergency room visits? I imagine this data would be very hard to ...

Dr. Drew Cumming, MD:

It is. Speaking generally, having a psychiatrist consulting with a different team does tend to improve long-term patient outcomes, certainly patient satisfaction scores. Looking at the inpatient side, particularly in an ICU, having a dedicated psychiatrist will decrease their length of stay and reduce their readmission rates. So, we're improving patient outcomes and improving hospital metrics.

Dr. Glen Stevens, DO, PhD:

So in the patient population, the Parkinson's population, what's the most difficult neuropsychiatric problem that you deal with?

Dr. Drew Cumming, MD:

Probably Parkinson's dementia. It's not like, say, Alzheimer's where we actually do have new and emerging therapies. It's not necessarily going to respond to the cholinesterase inhibitors, though we do incorporate those at times. But with mobility changes, urinary challenges, constipation, balancing your understanding of is this the dementing process that we're seeing, is this delirium that's playing in? It's challenging to understand, but then also challenging to help the patient and their families with.

Dr. Glen Stevens, DO, PhD:

And I'm just curious, do you also have embedded psychologists within your program?

Dr. Drew Cumming, MD:

We do. We have wonderful clinical psychologists. Actually, they're hired by the Movement Disorder Center and they're phenomenal working certainly with Parkinson's, but we also see FND patients. So they're helping with the CBT approach to FND, and whether you're new to the diagnosis, whether you have difficulty adjusting to progressing disability and illness, they're an invaluable resource.

Dr. Glen Stevens, DO, PhD:

And social workers as well, I take it?

Dr. Drew Cumming, MD:

Absolutely. Yeah.

Dr. Glen Stevens, DO, PhD:

So besides Parkinson's disease, other neurologic diseases that would benefit from a strong involvement of neuropsychiatrists?

Dr. Drew Cumming, MD:

All of them. We now have two psychiatrists that work with the movement disorder team, the same two, which includes myself with autoimmune neurology. We have a psychiatrist dedicated to the epilepsy team, and we just hired a new neuropsychiatrist who's going to be working with the TBI and stroke population.

Dr. Glen Stevens, DO, PhD:

Yeah. In brain tumor, we have a psychiatrist within the cancer center, and of course we have a social worker. Historically, the social workers have been very helpful as the portal to the psychiatrist, doing an initial screening with patients. As you can imagine, certainly tumors affecting the frontal lobe, you could see a lot of behavioral related changes, although certainly not to the extent of the problems that you see, but occasionally we see patients that have a lot of injury to the frontal lobes and get very frontal lobe-ish. And as mentioned earlier, with the steroids and those types of things, we certainly see people that run into issues with psychosis related to it. The earlier they're on, the better. I mean, the nice thing for you guys is you're there, so they just lean over and go, "This is your problem. Take care." We have to then find somebody to help us.

Dr. Drew Cumming, MD:

Yeah, I'm glad to hear that you do have psychiatrists working alongside you. I'm familiar with some of the Taussig psychiatry team, but I would be challenged to think of a subspecialty of neurology or any medical field that's not going to benefit from having an embedded psychiatrist with specialized knowledge of that patient cohort.

Dr. Glen Stevens, DO, PhD:

So are there conditions where the psychiatric input has negative ramifications for the patient or not? I guess it would be the type of thing where the patient just wouldn't be buying into it, right?

Dr. Drew Cumming, MD:

Sure. I don't think there's one particular condition or symptom that's more likely than not to experience that, but you do encounter patients or families who are not amenable to having a mental health diagnosis, a feeling of it's not all in my head. I might counter with, "Well, it's in your brain. Where else is it but your head?" That's not typically helpful.

Dr. Glen Stevens, DO, PhD:

Yeah, but I guess that's where it's helpful if you're seeing a lot. Most of the patients is just, hey, this is just our standard workflow. You're seeing the psychiatrist because they're part of the team. You may have limited needs now because, again, I think people start to go, "Why am I seeing the psychiatrist? What do you think is going on with me that-"

Dr. Drew Cumming, MD:

So maybe we do see that more often than not in FND patients, but when that happens, I feel that's more of an issue with our communication on the physician side. If we don't explain functional symptoms well, then it can be perceived as being psychological or again, it's all in your head, whereas it's not. We are starting to better and more understand the circuitry and adherent signaling involved in FND. But if we don't communicate that well to patients, then they say, "What do you mean I don't have seizures?" You do. They're just not epileptic seizures.

Dr. Glen Stevens, DO, PhD:

How frequently do patients in the Parkinson's area have to get admitted to a psych unit for management, or can most of these be managed?

Dr. Drew Cumming, MD:

It does happen, whether it's related to Parkinson's psychosis or advancing dementia that things become untenable at home, and we need time in a safe and secure environment to optimize medications and also help with dispo planning. So it does happen. Fortunately, not too often, but probably not greater than at a rate you would see, say, with advancing Alzheimer's.

Dr. Glen Stevens, DO, PhD:

You touched on it just a little bit. Are you actively collecting data on length of stay, readmissions, those types of things, or do you know?

Dr. Drew Cumming, MD:

Right now, we're trying to get a sense of what proportion of patients in the center are seen by psychiatry, and we're working to develop a triage system as well, simply because there's such a great need if someone has a drug-induced Parkinsonism. They don't necessarily need to be seen by a neuropsychiatrist. Well, happy to do it, but if the schedules are filling up and it's going to be six months, well, maybe they could be seen in the general psychiatry clinic. So we're working to understand how we can better triage and assign patients to make sure that they're certainly receiving appropriate care, but also timely care.

Dr. Glen Stevens, DO, PhD:

I know we were discussing offline a little bit that you were going to see a patient of mine. What percentage of patients are you seeing that aren't Parkinson's patients, or is that filling up your schedule and you don't really have time, for the most part, for non-Parkinson's patients?

Dr. Drew Cumming, MD:

I haven't done the math. At least at my work with the Movement Disorder Clinic, certainly at least 65% have Parkinson's, and then the other half of my clinic time is in the autoimmune neurology center, which is going to be 85 to 90% MS.

Dr. Glen Stevens, DO, PhD:

So the new Neurological Institute building, is it changing your work model at all or how's neuropsychiatry being integrated into the new building?

Dr. Drew Cumming, MD:

Yeah, so for listeners who haven't heard, we have a wonderful new building opening up. I'm not sure, but I hope neuro-oncology has a home there.

Dr. Glen Stevens, DO, PhD:

We do not.

Dr. Drew Cumming, MD:

Well, you're welcome to visit. For anyone who's been down to the main campus, you can't miss it, but we are moving all of the inpatient neurology, neurosurgery, and neuro ICU units over to the new building. Someone can correct me on this, but I think expanding overall beds by about a third for those teams, and then moving the majority of neurology and I'm sure neurosurgery, some psychiatry clinics to that building as well. So with the increase of beds, we realize that we're going to need more of a inpatient psychiatry consult presence. So I'm fortunate that I'm going to be taking on more consult work rather than half days. It's going to be a full-time. We'll have four neuropsychiatrists rotating on and off, providing full day coverage for the expanded building.

Dr. Glen Stevens, DO, PhD:

And how's it going to affect your outpatient clinics?

Dr. Drew Cumming, MD:

Unfortunately, it means less time for clinic, but we're working actually this week to finalize some of those schedules.

Dr. Glen Stevens, DO, PhD:

Are you hiring new neuropsychiatrists?

Dr. Drew Cumming, MD:

We are actively looking. If anyone wants to come to the conferences for the Neuropsychiatric Association, you're going to see our table there. You'll see our brochures. It's something of a small field, but we are looking to recruit as many great people as we can.

Dr. Glen Stevens, DO, PhD:

And neuropsychiatry is a discipline? Are there a lot of fellowships?

Dr. Drew Cumming, MD:

There are not too many fellowships, and the field is technically behavioral neurology and neuropsychiatry, so you can come to it from either end, as a neurologist or as a psychiatrist. Those two merged a few decades ago and to help fill this growing need, this year, actually, we've launched a new training track in our residency for select residents who want a focused training course in neuropsychiatry.

Dr. Glen Stevens, DO, PhD:

And five years from now, where's the field of neuropsychiatry going? How are you seeing it related to neurologic care?

Dr. Drew Cumming, MD:

I think that as our imaging modalities, our serum and CSF lab test availability increases, we're understanding more and more the neurological underpinnings, both neuropsychiatric and primary psychiatric disorders. So I think we'll have greater testing availability. We'll have increasingly precise medications available, and it's a very exciting time for the field.

Dr. Glen Stevens, DO, PhD:

Well, Drew, we're up against the clock. It's always hard to imagine, but sounds like an exciting time to be a neuropsychiatrist. Sounds like you're doing. The interplay that you have with Parkinson's physicians sounds like a very nice marriage there, and ultimately it's just good for the patients.

Dr. Drew Cumming, MD:

Absolutely. As exciting as it is for me to work with patient groups that I'm passionate about, I'm mostly happy that we're able to offer high-quality dedicated care for the patients and their families.

Dr. Glen Stevens, DO, PhD:

So I guess if you're out there listening to this podcast and you look after a lot of neurologic patients that have these types of disorders, you should become best friends with a psychiatrist/neuropsychiatrist and see how you can integrate them more into your clinics.

Dr. Drew Cumming, MD:

We're always happy to chat.

Dr. Glen Stevens, DO, PhD:

Thank you very much.

Dr. Drew Cumming, MD:

Thank you.

Closing:

This concludes this episode of Neuro Pathways. You can find additional podcast episodes on our website, clevelandclinic.org/neuropodcast, or subscribe to the podcast on iTunes, Google Play, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. And don't forget, you can access real-time updates from experts in Cleveland Clinic's Neurological Institute on our Consult QD website. That's consultqd.clevelandclinic.org/neuro, or follow us on Twitter @CleClinicMD , all one word. And thank you for listening.