Profile: Amy Burns, MD

Before medical school, Amy Burns, MDworked as a case manager in residential housing, where her interest in mental health care initially began. She got her medical degree from the University of Kansas. She completed her psychiatric residency at the University of Washington. Her clinical interests include motivational interviewing, expectancy disparities for the severely mentally ill, and working with the assertive community treatment (ACT) teams.She is currently working on a pilot study of reverse integration and a motivational interviewing training program, and is measuring the specific life expectancy disparity on an ACT team. She is attracted to collaborative care because it is a model that treats patients as a whole. She considers her most important work to be her work as an assertive community treatment psychiatrist. Five years from now, she hopes integrated care is the standard of care and that reverse integration is beginning to be more prominent too.