Mabel Bongmba, MD is the inaugural Associate Medical Director of Collaborative Care for Kaiser Permanente Washington. Dr. Bongmba’s interest in this care model stems from her experiences in public mental health as a medical trainee; the necessity of this work has been reinforced by the crippling shortage of mental health professionals in Washington and throughout our country. In five years, she hopes that her participation in the fellowship program will support the implementation of a high quality Collaborative Care program that will herald the successful expansion of this model of care across dozens of clinics. This will help improve access to specialty mental health services for the severely mentally ill. Dr. Bongmba has served as a psychiatric consultant and diversity, equity, and inclusion advisor. She has continuously provided direct care to adult patients at mental health specialty clinics over the past decade. 

Joseph Tomsic, ARNP is a Board Certified Psychiatric Mental Health Nurse Practitioner and Nurse Executive Advanced working in the south Puget Sound area. He has advanced degrees in Nursing from the University of Washington and Health Policy & Administration from Washington State University. He is a retried United States Air Force Lieutenant Colonel and Chief Nurse.

His initial mental health experience was in 1995 as a United States Navy Nurse Corps Officer (BSN, RN) and certified psychiatric nurse working on an inpatient mental health unit. Since then, his professional experience includes caring for military and civilian psychiatric patients in inpatient and outpatient settings. He transitioned from nursing leadership to the psychiatric nurse practitioner role in 2012. He works for the MultiCare Behavioral Health Network as an Outpatient Medical Director.

He enjoys living in the Pacific Northwest and just about any outdoor activity. He was born in Chicago but has lived in Washington State since 1976. He considers the Sumner/Puyallup Valley home. He is married and has three adult children.

Through participation in the fellowship program he hopes to gain advanced knowledge of integrated care to help expand access for community members to specialty psychiatric consultation. He would like to help the care team treat members of the community with mental health conditions within the primary care setting. He believes early intervention in primary care could help patients achieve and maintain recovery without the need for scarce community mental health psychiatric specialty care resources. He hopes that early access to specialty psychiatric consultation will help the care team avoid and/or better identify acute risk situations to reverse the multiyear trend of increasing suicide rates.

Jocelyn Engler, PharmD, PA-C is a psychiatric PA-C with an extensive background in pharmacotherapeutics. She graduated from the UW School of Pharmacy and MEDEX in 2016. She has been working as a pharmacist in compounding pharmacy since 2017. In addition to compounding, Dr. Engler has been working in community psychiatry for 4 years. She worked for a community-based private practice in Issaquah, WA, Family Psychiatry, treating school-aged and adolescent children, as well as adults. Since 2021, she works for Sound Health as a psychiatric PA-C treating children and adults with Intellectual and Development Disabilities (IDD). Sound Health is a nonprofit organization providing effective and innovative healthcare for the underserved in the community. Sound Health incorporates counseling, addiction treatment, mental health services for children, family oriented services, psychiatric services, and primary care.

Many of the individuals Dr. Engler treats are minimally verbal or non-verbal with a limited internal state; therefore, it is especially important to coordinate care with other medical specialties for an individual who is deviating from their baseline. Through participation in this program, she hopes to gain a better understanding of how to incorporate effective procedures to improve coordinated care amongst different specialties and Sound Health. She is hopeful streamlined coordination amongst medical specialties will improve patient outcomes. In five years, she hopes Collaborative Care/integrated care will be a standard of practice with all medical institutions including large healthcare systems, private practices, and nonprofit community-based clinics.

Anne Chapin, PA works with PeaceHealth primary care clinics in Bellingham, Burlington, and Sedro Woolley as a consultant for the Integrated Behavioral Health program. Through participating in this program, she hopes to increase her skills and knowledge in delivering this model of care to be as effective as possible in her role. Her hope is that this model can expand access to behavioral health services to all primary care clinics at some point.

Anna Raymaker, DNP, ARNP, PMHNP-BC provides psychiatric services at Columbia Valley Community Health (CVCH), a Federally Qualified Health Center (FQHC), in Chelan, WA. This is the first time that CVCH Chelan has had a psychiatric prescriber on site full-time. Dr. Anna Raymaker provides both ongoing psychiatric treatment to a panel of patients as well as consultative services to the primary care providers (PCPs) at CVCH Chelan.

Dr. Anna Raymaker has worked in healthcare for approximately 10 years, and has explored various settings, specialties, and geographic locations throughout her career. She feels fortunate to have a meandering and nonlinear career, as it has provided her with so many unique and rewarding learning experiences.

CVCH Chelan utilizes an integrated care model, where medical, dental, and behavioral health services are provided under the same roof and in a collaborative way. Dr. Anna Raymaker is new to this model and hopes to further develop the communication and clinical skills necessary for this model of care through the UW Community-Based Integrated Care Fellowship.

Dr. Anna Raymaker hopes that involvement with the UW Community-Based Integrated Care Fellowship will allow her to help facilitate growth of behavioral health services within her agency and her community. For the near future, Dr. Anna Raymaker hopes that integrated care becomes a possible model for all rural communities, as rural healthcare continues have unmet primary care and behavioral health needs. 

Sahciko Oshio, PhD has a private practice mainly focused on women’s care for Japanese speaking women. She has been providing midwifery and women’s healthcare in various settings (private obstetrician’s office, my own private clinic, and hospital-based midwifery practices) in the past 20 years and recently added mental healthcare to the same population. Her main interest is women’s reproductive mental healthcare.

She is a novice as a mental healthcare provider. She hopes to learn from the leaders and fellow participants the arts of mental healthcare. She would like to develop a network of resources she can turn to and send patients to as appropriate for their needs, and in turn, she would like to be a resource for Puget Sound area women’s healthcare providers and birth communities.

Psychiatric mental healthcare can be more effective when paired with the content-specific expertise of specialists in various settings. For example, she is intimately familiar with experiences of infertility treatments, miscarriages and still births. She has supported patients through traumatic birth experiences and knows the reality of having a challenging newborn infant at home. By adding collaborative care provision skills, she can support perinatal/women’s healthcare providers with stronger mental health component.

Mental healthcare will become routine component for midwives and women’s healthcare providers.

Danielle Waldron, MSN, ARNP is entering her eighth year as a psychiatric nurse practitioner. She works both at Behavioral Health Urgent Care (BHUC) and in a small private practice in Snohomish County. In her clinical work at the BHUC, she assesses patients in crisis and assists those with difficulties accessing psychiatric care in their community. She provides psychiatric evaluation as well as consultation with ER physicians, primary care providers, and case managers, with the goal of assisting with ongoing care recommendations. She encounters a wide range of psychiatric disorders in this setting. In her work in private practice, she provides ongoing medication management and supportive therapy.

While she has some experience collaborating with primary care providers in her current work, she would like to improve her knowledge and skill set through the UW Community Based Integrated Care Fellowship. She is particularly interested in improving care around perinatal mental health and substance use disorders in integrated models. These patients are often seen as too complex for integrated care; however, they often have no other options for care. Her participation in this program will improve how she is able to advocate for integrated care for patient populations who are underserved.

In five years from now she hopes to see Collaborative Care expanded to reach more patients in need of psychiatric care in a timely manner.

Yehonatan Shilo, MD is a psychiatrist at PeaceHealth St. John Medical Center in Longview, WA. 

He spends ⅔ of his time in outpatient, and ⅓ of his time doing hospital work and consultations in the ED as well as on the medical/surgical floors. 

This is his first job as an attending, after a long international journey in which he was exposed as a student, intern and resident to psychiatric care and primary care in Italy, Israel and now, the USA. 

Dr. Shilo’s interest in collaborative/integrated care has increased since he started practicing in a more rural/underserved area, especially during the COVID 19 pandemic. The limited access to care has made first presentations more clinically severe and has unnecessarily prolonged suffering. 

He hopes to gain tools that will allow him to help more people in an efficient and safe way. 

Dr. Shilo believes that in today’s reality in which psychiatric care is constantly lacking in availability and the prevalence of mental health problems only keeps rising, collaborative/integrated care will become more prevalent and being part of the model will become the reality for a lot of psychiatrists. 

Benjamin Stephens, MD is a 2021 graduate from the University of Virginia General Psychiatry Residency now in private practice in the Charlottesville, Virginia area.  He spends most of his time in direct patient care and hopes to form relationships with local primary care providers to establish his own collaborative care practice.  Dr. Stephens clinical experiences with behavioral health integration in primary care and rural telemedicine to underserved areas of Virginia has driven his interest in the collaborative care model.  He hopes to deliver higher quality care, at lower cost, to more Virginians who need mental health services.  By participating in the Community Based Fellowship Dr. Stephens hopes to bring the best practices in collaborative care back to Central Virginia.  In 5 years he hopes to have his own collaborative care practice and see collaborative care become more common in psychiatry residency training programs in Virginia.

Bianca Reis, DNP, ARNP, PMHNP-BC graduated from the Doctor of Nurse Practice program at the University of Washington in 2020 and has since worked as an outpatient Psychiatric Nurse Practitioner at a Community Health Center treating children through adults. Prior to this, Dr. Reis worked as a Psychiatric Clinical Nurse Specialist at UW-Valley Medical Center, overseeing the treatment of patients on the medical floors hospitalized with a primary or secondary, co-occurring psychiatric condition.

Dr. Reis would like to bring the extraordinary multidisciplinary and collaborative care work and effort she has experienced in the acute care setting to the outpatient setting. Although the collaborative care model is growing in community health, there continues to be systemic barriers to its progress and success. Dr. Reis hopes that this program will provide the tools to address the obstacles so that collaborative and integrated care models can grow and thrive.

Five years from now, she hopes that most of the current barriers to meaningful collaborative/integrated care models are eliminated so that care team members communicate effectively to bring about improved outcomes in our communities.