Sasha Ericksen, MD, is a psychiatrist at MultiCare Behavioral Health in Tacoma, Washington, and Clinical Faculty at Tacoma Family Medicine Residency program and East Pierce Addiction Medicine Fellowship program. She has an outpatient psychiatry practice, and teaches psychiatry and provides supervision to trainees. She has been co-located with primary care for 4 years. She has previously worked in tribal health, private practice, and group practice.   

Dr. Ericksen became interested in Collaborative Care due to the pressures of working in mental health in a rural community, and the promise of collaborating across health disciplines. She recently received a grant to start a pilot collaborative care program at the residency, focusing on an urban underserved community with high rates of addiction. She hopes that the fellowship program will help her optimize this program and make it a successful example for integration in a wider system. 

In the future, Dr. Ericksen hopes that integrated care will become more common, more acceptable and more useful for patients and providers. Expanding access and improving satisfaction rates for patients and providers is a worthy goal. She also hopes that integrated health systems can break through long held barriers preventing mental health and medical health providers from working together for overall wellness.   

Sara Weelborg, ARNP is an adult psychiatric nurse practitioner in private practice in University Place. She also contracts with the Squaxin Island Health Clinic to provide psychiatric medication management via telemedicine and onsite medication management for the Northwest Indian Treatment Center. She is currently completing her Doctor of Nursing Practice degree at Boise State University; she received her master’s degree at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, and her post-master’s certificate at Rush University. She is a US Navy Nurse Corps retiree and has worked as a psychiatric nurse practitioner for 17 years in various settings.

Believing that patients can be well-served by receiving their mental health care within their familiar primary care practice setting, she is interested in incorporating the Collaborative Care Model into her current practice. She feels strongly that integrated care can help reduce stigma and improve access to timely mental health intervention. She hopes that participation in the fellowship will help her incorporate the Collaborative Care Model into her current practice so she can help improve access to care in her community and partner with primary care staff to share knowledge and experience to support their delivery of mental health services.

She hopes that five years from now, Collaborative Care/integrated care will be a common care delivery model in primary care practices rather than a novel idea.

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.

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.

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.

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. 

Rozina Lakhani, MD has been providing personalized psychiatric treatment and burnout prevention training at Shifa Health in Everett and Mount Vernon, WA since 2003. She also shares tips for mental fitness for leaders as an author, a speaker, and a podcast host. Starting September 2022, Dr. Lakhani’s role is transitioning into directing a Psychiatric Mental Health Nurse Practitioner Fellowship in Outpatient Psychiatry at the Shifa Institute of Happy and Healthy Minds. 

“Seeing tears in patients’ eyes change into smiles brings me the greatest joy in life. But it hurts my heart when I hear that they have waited for years to be able to see a psychiatric provider,”  Dr. Lakhani says. She hopes to bring the optimum whole person care within easy reach of the people who are suffering from stress, anxiety, and depression through the Collaborative Care Model.

Dr. Lakhani hopes that involvement with the UW Community-Based Integrated Care Fellowship will allow her to help facilitate collaboration between private practice psychiatry and primary care in her community. She can further impart the knowledge she gains to her fellows so more providers embrace this model and more people can live their best lives with health and happiness, avoiding unnecessary suffering.

In five years, she hopes that Collaborative Care/integrated care becomes the standard of care and is easily accessible for the majority of the population.

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. 

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.

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.