Jessica Whitfield, MD, MPH, serves as an Acting Assistant Professor in the Psychiatry & Behavioral Sciences at the University of Washington School of Medicine. She is a psychiatric consultant for the UW’s Behavioral Health Integration Program (BHIP) and the Outpatient Psychiatric Clinic at the UW Medical Center. She also is a co-director of the Psychiatric Consultant Learning Collaborative and provides program assistance for the Integrated Care Training Program Fellowship as a clinical supervisor and co-coordinator for the implementation, quality improvement, and collaborative care rotations. She received her medical degree from Saint Louis University School of Medicine and her Masters of Public Health from Columbia University. She completed her residency in General Adult Psychiatry at Brown University as well as the Integrated Care Training Program Fellowship at UW.
Fellowship Year: 2018-2019
Ginni Buccola-Tournay, ARNP
Ginny Buccola-Tourney, DNP, ARNP works as a PMHNP, both in a small private practice and in community mental health, both in Pierce County. At the community mental health center where she spends most of her time, she serves as the manager of medical services, providing supervision and administrative support to a team of 5 providers as well as providing direct care to clients. She provides medication management for children, adolescents and adults with a specialty focus in perinatal mental health. She also enjoys providing reflective supervision in infant mental health for our local Nurse Family Partnership nurses and teaching both about perinatal mental health and infant mental health.
Ms. Buccola-Tourney is very interested in a model of care that supports psychiatric specialists serving as consultants to primary care providers. She would like to develop a sustainable model for her clinic to provide consultation to their area primary care providers. She is also hoping to build relationships and learn from other providers throughout the state.
Her clinic has struggled to recruit and retain psychiatric providers, and this will be even more pressing over the next few years as the majority of their provider team is close to retirement. Simultaneously there is a great push to transition more stable clients out of her clinic and back to their primary care providers. This type of transfer is not always successful as there is no current structure for them to provide ongoing consultation or relationship building with our informal community partners. With active collaboration we would be able to expand access for clients to have their psychiatric medications safely and effectively managed.
Ms. Buccola-Tourney has many hopes! She hopes that they have an effective consultation system in place for psychiatric specialists to provide consultation with primary care providers. She hopes that EMR systems are in place to facilitate provider to provider communication. She hopes that psychiatric care is more easily accessible to those who are in need and that they can receive the best quality care quickly and efficiently.
Susan Marney, ARNP
Susan Marney, ARNP has been a psychiatric nurse practitioner for over 20 years and currently practices at Catholic Charities in Wenatchee, Washington where she works primarily with children and adolescents. Catholic Charities is in the process of integrating with medicine and she is the first practitioner to spend part of each week in a pediatric setting partnering with Columbia Valley Community Health to help provide integrated care.
Ms. Marney was previously the director of the Behavioral Health Department at Confluence Health and worked closely with administration and medical practitioners to move from a co-location model to an integrated one. She has a strong interest in finding ways to integrate services from a patient-centered perspective where relationships with patients are made stronger. She and her colleagues are at the forefront of designing a medical home for the chronically mentally ill and children who are in fragile circumstances and require intensive outpatient care.
Ms. Marney hopes that five years from now, the barriers between agencies in her community will be gone and patients will be able to easily and effectively get their medical and mental health needs met by practitioners who are skilled and well-connected to their patients and to each other.
Joseph Baldwin, MD
Joseph Baldwin, MD received his medical degree from the University of Michigan and will complete his residency at the University of Washington in June 2018.
Throughout his rotations at UW, Dr. Baldwin was drawn to several different fellowship opportunities. After doing his leadership elective during his third year he became more interested in quality improvement and population-based medicine. He realized that the Integrated Care Fellowship combined his love of teaching, the role of a consulting psychiatrist, team-based patient care, the role of quality improvement, and population-based medicine to increase access to care.
Dr. Baldwin believes that increasing access to mental health care and tracking outcomes to ensure better quality of care captures some of integrated care’s most important work. Even within his time in residency, he has seen a huge increase in the interest and push for collaborative care. He sees this trajectory continuing and is excited to be a part of it.
Michele Rowsome, ARNP
Michele Rowsome, ARNP functions as a behavioral consultant within a community based outpatient VA primary care clinic in Mount Vernon. She has worked within the VA system for 13 years.
Because of her role as ‘prescriber’ on a Primary Care Mental Health Integration (PCMHI) team, Ms. Rowsome has a built-in and vested interest in integrated care. She hopes to gain clinical skills that will help improve patient outcomes, and knowledge about how to more fully integrate with and consult with primary care providers.
Ms. Rowsome hopes that her participation in this program improves access to and quality of integrated and collaborative care for the rural veterans that she serves.
In 5 years, Ms. Rowsome sees integrated care as busier and more consultative in nature, because there will be strong buy-in from primary care providers. She also views it as a very efficient and cost-effective way to provide mental health care to people who may not be willing or able to present to a specialty mental health clinic. She feels that telepsychiatry has the potential to be an excellent avenue for connecting with patients who live in a rural setting so that they have appropriate access to the care they need.
Eric Pascual, PA-C
Eric Pascual, PA-C is a newly graduated physician assistant, working at Columbia Wellness, a mental health clinic in Longview, WA.
Through Collaborative Care/integrated care, he hopes to gain knowledge about tele-psychiatry and other methods to better serve his community and the surrounding areas.
Mr. Pascual would also like to learn how to integrate psychiatric practices with primary care in anticipation of future growth of his company.
Five years from now, he would like to see a fully integrated partnership between primary care and mental health services at his job.
Janet Clingaman, ARNP
Janet Clingaman, MN, ARNP received her Master of Nursing degree in 1991 at the University of Washington. She has worked as a psychiatric nurse practitioner for the past 24 years in Washington state, mostly in rural community mental health centers.
Ms. Clingaman has worked in mental health settings her entire nursing career, inspired to enter this specialty by a nursing school mentor. Her first experience with integrated care was at her current job at Unity Care Northwest in Bellingham, an FQHC where she has worked for the past 4 years.
Ms. Clingaman’s interest in integrated care stems from a career working largely in isolation from the general medical community, and the challenges she had in advocating for the medical needs of her patients. Her primary patient population has been the chronically mentally ill, a population with a high burden of co-morbid health problems who encounter many barriers getting healthcare.
Her goals for the remainder of her career are to improve the integrated care program at her current job and to serve as a preceptor to future nurse practitioner students.
Jacynda Wheeler, DO
Jacynda Wheeler, DO, currently works at Island Hospital in Anacortes, in their Psychiatry & Behavioral Health Clinic, doing general outpatient psychiatry and working with a broad range of patients. The behavioral health clinic was established to support primary care clinics and providers in the community in providing quality mental health care.
Dr. Wheeler’s involvement in the integrated care track during residency at the University of Washington exposed her to the dynamic work going on at the interface of primary care and psychiatry. She is excited to further her knowledge in this fellowship while working to develop a more formal integrated care program at Island Hospital. She thinks we have an exciting opportunity to further our mission and improve access to mental health care by learning from the expertise and experience that the UW AIMS Center has to offer.
Dr. Wheeler is hopeful that 5 years from today, integrated care will feel more like a standard of care, and something that patients come to expect from their primary care clinics rather than feeling lucky to be part of a new program.
Vernetta Stewart, ARNP
Vernetta Stewart, ARNP works as a psychiatric mental health consultant at Providence Everett Regional Medical Center (team includes two psychiatrists, two psychiatric N.P.s) performing mental health evaluations for patients with various co-morbidities including acute medical conditions, substance use disorders, and of course psychiatric components; prescribing psychotropic medications; advising medical providers; and making recommendations for treatment and disposition.
Ms. Stewart wishes to update her knowledge, including the use of alternative therapies on the most prevalent/effective clinical practices, psycho-pharmacotherapy, tele-psychiatry, and available community resources as well as the economic and political influences governing mental health services, especially with our underprivileged population.
Ms. Stewart’s long nursing career (as a staff RN and ARNP) has largely been centered in acute care settings in the Providence/Swedish systems and to a lesser degree in community mental health clinics. In the latter role, she has collaborated with PCPs, various agency case managers and clinicians, private practice psychiatric nurse practitioners, and of course patients’ families. There is much more to learn, however.
Ms. Stewart trusts participation in this program will facilitate her patients’ wellbeing in receiving the best treatment possible, especially upon being discharged back to the community which includes Everett and the outerlying rural areas.
Simone Hall, ARNP
Simone Hall, ARNP works for Community Health Center of Snohomish County, a federally qualified health center, as a psychiatric ARNP and behavioral health clinical director. She supervises 8 other staff and performs various administrative duties. In her clinical work, she provides psychiatric evaluation, consultation, and medication management for primary care patients. She works with patients that have a variety of mental health conditions and come from diverse backgrounds, most of whom are underserved.
Ms. Hall’s hope is to improve her knowledge base in the deliverance of care to populations served in the integrated care setting and become a more efficient and effective consulting provider for her primary care colleagues. She also hopes to learn more about the implementation of telepsychiatry, especially in a setting where resources may be scarce.
She believes her participation will improve the quality of care that is provided within her organization. With the knowledge that she gains from this fellowship, perhaps her organization will be able to utilize their resources more efficiently so that a greater number of patients can utilize their mental health services.
Five years from now, Ms. Hall’s hope is that Collaborative Care/integrated care is the normative approach for all outpatient settings in Washington state and becomes a model that more states adopt.