MaryAnne Murray, DNP, EdD, FNP-BC, PMHNP-BC, CARN-AP

MaryAnne Murray, DNP, EdD, FNP-BC, PMHNP-BC, CARN-AP has lived in Western Washington since she was a small child. Twenty years ago she left the big city and has lived in a series of rural communities. When she landed on the Long Beach Peninsula eight years ago, she found her place of joy. She is self-employed in a small private practice, plus she contract her services to a residential substance use disorder treatment program where she performs a psychiatric evaluation and medication management for each client. She also does some teaching, including precepting PMHNP students.

She has undergone training in MindBody Medicine and believes that health care needs to address the needs of the whole person. Integrated care is one way to accomplish this, and this fellowship offers a model which can work effectively while leveraging the skills of a psychiatric prescriber as a consultant to assist primary care providers in helping patients achieve their goals. She hopes to do this for her hometown and other communities in her rural county. She hopes to collaborate with two primary care physicians and a cast of ancillary-skilled individuals to create an integrated care clinic which likely will serve individuals from their town as well as 0communities up to 50 miles away.

In 2026, she expects that integrative care will be the model that people demand. She predicts that unless a person has a longstanding relationship with a particular primary care provider, he or she will reject primary care options which fail to include the whole-person focus. By that time, the other primary care clinics in her rural county will have adopted our model, or ask her or her team to show them how they have accomplished it. She hopes that by 2026, her team will be able to provide this care in a cost-effective manner with appropriate reimbursement which will allow them to pay their team reasonably well, offer the best healthcare place to work, and provide the most comprehensive healthcare services in the county.

Paul Grekin, MD

Paul Grekin, MD attended University of Michigan School of Medicine and completed psychiatry residency and community psychiatry fellowship at the University of Washington. He began work at Evergreen Treatment Services, an opioid treatment program that now has clinics in Seattle, Renton and Olympia, providing psychiatric care to patients with opioid use disorder who were unable to obtain that care elsewhere. He was subsequently promoted to medical director, overseeing the opioid treatment provided by a team of advanced practice nurses and physician assistants, as well as supervising the managers of each clinic’s dispensaries. During his career he has also served as medical director at Seattle Counseling Service for Sexual Minorities and provided psychiatric care and consultation at Pike Market Medical Clinic.

Patients with opioid use disorder have a high incidence of co-morbid psychiatric and medical problems for which they often have difficulty receiving adequate care due to stigma, distrust, poor organization and lack of resources. They are high users of acute medical systems, including emergency departments and hospitals. Providing primary medical and psychiatric services on site at the opioid treatment program, where the patients are already attending and feel a level of trust, should improve the patient utilization of needed care. However, experience suggests that even co-locating services does not overcome the barriers for many patients. Dr. Grekin envisions using the collaborative care model to facilitate the provision of integrated care by providers with whom the patients already have a trusting relationship. Dr. Grekin is participating in the fellowship to develop the knowledge and skills to implement integrated care using the Collaborative Care model at Evergreen Treatment Services and sees this as a potential model for other opioid treatment programs to pursue.

Angela Hamel, ARNP, PMHNP-BC

Angela Hamel, ARNP, PMHNP-BC will be starting her 3rd year serving patients of all ages at Kadlec Behavioral Health Clinic. She is also working at Washington State University as an adjunct professor teaching nurse practitioner students specializing in psychiatry. Prior to becoming a nurse practitioner she was an acute care nurse for over five years.

Mrs. Hamel received her Master’s degree at Gonzaga University. She is currently completing her Doctorate in nursing practice at Chatham University. Mrs. Hamel is a Center of Excellence, meaning she has been trained to diagnose and refer clients with Autistic Spectrum Disorders (ASD) to Applied behavioral analysis (ABA). She has also achieved her Medication Assisted Intervention (MAT) waiver for the purposes of opioid use disorder treatment.

Mrs. Hamel has been collaborating with primary care providers in her current organization by making recommendations for patients with mild to moderate symptoms of mental illness. She is hoping to improve this program by participating in the UW Community-Based Integrated Care Fellowship. She is particularly interested in utilizing collaborative care to reach more individuals with mental illness and learn how to incorporate telepsychiatry into her practice to help patients in underserved areas.

Leslie Hite, ARNP, PMHNP-BC

Leslie Hite, ARNP, PMHNP-BC is a Psychiatric Mental Health Nurse Practitioner at Mid-Valley Clinic, a rural health clinic in Omak, WA (Okanogan County). She provides mental healthcare services for individuals across the lifespan and works collaboratively with primary care providers, specialty healthcare providers, chronic care managers, and community support services to provide a “team-based” approach to health. Ms. Hite also takes referrals from healthcare providers all over Okanogan County to meet the mental health needs of Okanogan County.   

Ms. Hite is interested in collaborative and integrated healthcare because she believes that a “team-based” approach has always been the best healthcare approach. She enjoys working together with an individual’s primary care provider and including other specialty providers and community resources to provide the best opportunity for health and wellbeing. Through this fellowship, she hopes to gain knowledge, new resources, and new ideas in providing integrated healthcare. 

Ms. Hite chose to pursue this fellowship to develop knowledge and skill in providing integrated healthcare that she plans to share with the healthcare providers and staff that she works together with which will increase the health of individuals across the clinic, community, and county.

In 5 years, she hopes to see that all healthcare providers are practicing collaborative or integrated healthcare everywhere. In Okanogan County, she hopes to see a positive trend in healthcare statistics or community health scores because of practicing integrated healthcare. 

Po Karczewski, ARNP

Po Karczewski, ARNP is a contract prescriber, Psychiatric ARNP, currently providing medication management, assessment, and motivational interviewing for an inpatient drug and alcohol treatment facility, a child and adolescent clinic which has not offered medication management previously, and a clinic serving HIV positive clients.  He has always been an advocate for the importance of therapy, good nutrition, physical health, healing environments and psychiatric medication being used in conjunction with each other, along with emphasizing the cautious and judicious use of psychiatric medication. 

Mr. Karczewski hopes to develop a better understanding of how to be an effective voice for integrated care in his community in Pierce County, and to be able to work with the other Fellowship graduates in his area. Some efforts in this area in the past have resulted in sub-standard care, and it is important to have an effective model for integration.

He hopes to see Collaborative Care/integrated care be the standard of practice/organization. He thinks that the sharing of information systems with rigorous history and current status charting is likely to be more effective than attempts at partial co-location of services.

Katherine Kirner, ARNP

Katherine Kirner, ARNP has worked as a primary care provider at a Federally Qualified Health Center in Twisp, WA for the past 12 years. At least an hour from the nearest hospital or referral center, there is a mixture of  primary and emergent/crisis care. Frustrated by the lack of psychiatric resources in the area, she returned to school for certification as a PMHNP a few years ago. Now, she is also working as a psychiatric nurse practitioner at a small private practice. She continues to use her behavioral health expertise within the confines of a traditional primary care appointment.  

By participating in the Community-Based Integrated Care Fellowship Ms. Kirner looks forward to exploring ways to bring those two worlds together. As her organization moves toward integration of behavioral health and primary care, they are challenged by the geographic isolation of each of their clinics and lack of qualified providers. Ms. Kirner hopes to learn about telehealth and other strategies to provide resources for both patients and clinicians, even in the most remote clinics.

In the future, she would like to see behavioral health strategies used for all aspects of health care – from traditional mental health issues to diabetes and IBS. She is encouraged by the efforts of the University of Washington and other organizations to increase accessibility but acknowledges that there is still significant stigma and resistance on the part of patients. She believes that, through integrated care, we can continue to break down those barriers and normalize the experience of seeking help.

Anne Koomen, MS, ARNP

Anne Koomen, MS, ARNP is a psychiatric nurse practitioner on the Olympic Peninsula, an area of Washington that struggles to maintain adequate access to specialty services. Her work in mental health services began in the early 2000’s, and throughout these years she has held a growing concern about the stark and oftentimes unbridgeable divides between systems of care. She became a psychiatric nurse practitioner after working for a non-profit organization serving children in Bangalore, India where she witnessed innumerable children unable to make the strides forward that they would like to because there were too many barriers for effective collaboration between service providers. It became apparent to her that in order to provide a higher quality of care she would need to transition into a role where she could offer a link between primary care and mental health services.

Ms. Koomen started her career as a nurse practitioner in 2012, and since then has worked in community mental health services in Port Angeles, WA. In this position she provided psychiatric evaluation and medication management for patients across the lifespan in tight collaboration with patients’ therapists, case managers, and primary care providers. Ms. Koomen is now entering into a role as a psychiatric consultant in the primary care clinics at Jefferson Healthcare in Port Townsend, WA. This organization is working hard to extend psychiatric access to this rural community with the use of the AIMS Model, and she is excited to be a part of this process.

Through participation in this program, Ms. Koomen hopes to gain more tools for easing collaboration between the various systems that intersect in patients’ lives. She is particularly looking forward to thinking about ways to expand the collaborative care model into both pediatric and perinatal care where there are strong needs for clear communication between systems and improved access to services. Regarding pediatric care, Ms. Koomen hopes that in 5 years we will be able to use the collaborative care model to coordinate in a more streamlined manner with special education services and teachers. She also hopes that we can continue to grow access for women who are planning pregnancy, currently pregnant, or in their first year after birth in order to improve the outcomes for their mental health and the mental health of their children.

Mariana Sant Anna Neeway, DNP

Mariana Sant’Anna Neeway, DNP is a psychiatric mental health nurse practitioner at the Kadlec Behavioral Health Clinic in Richland. Kadlec Medical Center (and its many clinics) is the largest health care provider in the Tri-Cities area. Dr. Neeway works in outpatient medication management for patients across the lifespan dealing with psychiatric and mental health disorders. She works in an underserved area with a diverse population, both ethnically and socioeconomically. She hopes that the Community-Based Integrated Care Fellowship helps her and her team better develop and utilize their integrated care practice. She is also interested in telepsychiatry as a possibility for some of their patient appointments. 

Jennifer Purses, DO

Jennifer Purses, DO, is board certified in general psychiatry and child and adolescent psychiatry. She has been providing direct psychiatric consultative coverage in the acute care setting at Mary Bridge Children’s (a regional tertiary care children’s hospital) since August 2013 and has served as the Medical Director of Consultation & Liaison Psychiatry there since April 2016. More recently, her role is evolving to better strengthen outpatient primary care settings through providing support to co-located psychiatric nurse practitioners and through exploring novel models of care delivery to better address challenges of access to mental health services for pediatric primary care populations.

Dr. Purses has become very interested in the Collaborative Care Model and how this model may be adapted for children, adolescents, and families. She hopes that participating in this fellowship program will provide the skills and knowledge to establish a concrete plan moving toward better integration in pediatric primary care settings in the Mary Bridge Children’s Hospital & Health Network and across the Pacific Northwest. Learning what is needed to implement an integrated care model into our primary care settings is imperative to overcome barriers to care, particularly access. Educating and empowering primary care settings to care for basic mental health needs of children and families provides the opportunity to unburden specialty providers, allowing them to focus on higher acuity, more severe mental health needs, resulting in improved access to services for everyone.

Dr. Purses hopes that 5 years from now, Mary Bridge will have implemented a robust and successful Collaborative Care Model that allows families to receive care for basic mental health services in settings with which they are familiar and comfortable, thereby reducing barriers to care. She hopes that the roll-out of this novel model of care delivery will result in more children receiving the care they need, pediatricians feeling better equipped and increasingly competent at caring for the whole patient, and better integration of patient & family-centered care within primary (and perhaps even specialty) care

Debra Rice, ARNP, PMHNP

Debra Rice, ARNP, PMHNP is a Psychiatric Mental Health Nurse Practitioner (PMHNP), who currently provides outpatient psychiatric care at Catholic Charities in Richland and Yakima. This is a shared position involving a short commute and a diverse clientele. Debra has worked as a psychiatric provider for five years in both inpatient and outpatient settings. Prior to becoming a provider, she taught nursing and worked for twelve years at Eastern State Hospital as a psychiatric nurse. Her varied work background provided a rich landscape of psychiatric experiences that highlights the importance of collaboration in providing holistic care.

Ms. Rice believes that collaborative care is critical to the environment of psychiatric care, where many of the clients are disenfranchised and economically impoverished. These financial limitations affect the ability of psychiatric clients to access medical care; it also impacts their ability to effectively navigate complex communication contexts once they are engaged with the clinical setting. These factors make collaboration, and advocacy critical for preventative health care. Ms. Rice hopes to expand her ability to meet the many and varied needs of psychiatric clients through the collaborative/integrative care program.

Recently the premier Cardiac Center in the Yakima Valley, Astria Regional Medical Center, closed its doors. This closure has further impacted the lack of healthcare access in the Yakima Valley. Modalities like telemedicine are imperative to provide this area with the health care so important to meet the needs of the Valley. The Yakima Valley is also home to the Yakama Nation, a federally recognized tribe whose homeland covers 130,000 acres in southwestern Washington. The suicide rates among Native Americans is three times that of the national rate. As a provider in the Yakima Valley, Ms. Rice hopes her participation in this program will aid her in establishing new ways of expanding outreach to this rural community.

Ms. Rice is hoping that the collaborative/integrative care model becomes the standard of care within the next five years. She is confident that the use of this model will aid in providing holistic care to the Yakima Valley.