Elizabeth Chmelik, MD is a staffpsychiatrist at the VA Puget Sound where her office is embedded in a primary care clinic. In this setting, she works directly with primary care physicians and a team of other mental health providers to serve this sometimes challenging but often very rewarding population. Dr. Chmelik attended medical school in Ohio, completed her 4-year psychiatry residency in Chicago, and finally completed a 1-year fellowship in consult-liaison psychiatry at the University of Washington. During these training and work roles, she has always been fascinated by the interplay between general medical and mental health symptoms and disorders, leading to agrowing interest in ways to best serve the primary care patient population.
Staff Type: Contributing Faculty
Kelly Caver, PhD
Kelly Caver, PhD lectures in the didactic seminars for ICTP. She is a contributor to the Challenging Clinical Situations and Chronic Pain curriculum. Dr. Caver is a clinical psychologist who works in Primary Care Mental Health Integration (PCMHI) at the Seattle VA, in both the Primary Care clinic and Women’s Health clinic.
She received her PhD in Counseling Psychology from Texas A&M University. While treating veterans through their primary care clinics via videoconferencing as a telehealth psychologist at the North Texas VA, Dr. Caver became interested in addressing patients’ physical health concerns, such as chronic pain, along with traditional mental health concerns. After learning about the VA’s Primary Care Mental Health Integration program at a conference, in 2014 she transferred to the Seattle VA to her current position in Primary Care Mental Health Integration. She provides triage evaluation, brief individual and group psychotherapy, and consultation to primary care clinic staff.
Dr. Caver has developed several groups and classes in PCMHI.Her professional interests include chronic pain, PTSD, anxiety disorders, depression, smoking cessation, telemental health, meditation, multiculturalism, supervision and training, and program development. She is proud of the VA’s efforts to reduce stigma and promote access to behavioral health services within primary care clinics and hopes that in five years that all primary care clinics will be able to provide same-day access to mental health services. Dr. Caver believes that her most important work is in adapting evidence-based psychological treatments into integrative care settings.
Susan Collins, PhD
Susan E. Collins, Ph.D., is a licensed clinical psychologist who has been has been involved in substance use research, assessment and treatment for over two decades. Dr. Collins serves as director of the Harm Reduction Research and Treatment (HaRRT) Center at Harborview Medical Center, Seattle. She works with a multidisciplinary research and clinical team, community-based agencies, traditional Native healers and substance-using community members to develop and evaluate interventions that aim to reduce substance-related harm and improve quality of life for affected individuals and their communities. She is also a provider and member of the Evidence-based Practice Committee in the Mental Health and Addiction Services Center at Harborview.
Dr. Collins’ vision is to work with communities to create a toolbox of harm reduction interventions that empower individuals to reduce their substance-related harm and improve their quality of life
Ryan Kimmel, MD
Ryan Kimmel, MD attended Medical School at the University of Washington and did his residency at the University of California, San Diego. During his residency, he enjoyed seeing hospitalized and medically complex patients. After his residency, he worked in a community hospital for two years before coming back to academics. In the past, he has seen outpatients through the Seattle Cancer Care Alliance and in a medication management clinic at the UWMC’s Outpatient Psychiatry Clinic. Dr. Kimmel is currently the Medical Director of Hospital Psychiatry at the UW. He sees patients on the UWMC’s Inpatient Psychiatry Unit, as well as on the general Medical, Surgical, and Oncology wards. Dr. Kimmel’s clinical interests include psychopharmacology as well as quality improvement. He cites his most important work as the at-the-bedside teaching he does with residents and the psychopharmacology didactics he delivers to a range of mental health professionals. He admires the resilience his patients show in the face of serious psychiatric and medical co-morbidity and enjoys helping them get through tough situations. Five years from now, Dr. Kimmel hopes that Collaborative Care is able to help more people in community hospital settings who have little local access to psychiatric consultants.
Cecilia Margret, MD, PhD, MPH
Cecilia Margret, MD is from Madras, India, a sunny and humid coastal city where she completed her medical school and started her early pursuits in psychiatry. She then moved to the United States, to pursue developmental neuroscience and advanced psychiatric training. She studied different ideologies from neurophysiology to psychoanalytical frameworks and mental health care designs in her pursuit to understand the mind and matter while working concretely with children and families who are impacted by it. Following her core interest in expanding psychiatric health service and access to care, she completed an NIH fellowship in primary care psychiatric training under the guidance of Dr. Wayne Katon and explored collaborative models in child psychiatric care. She envisions her role, in the next fiveyears, to expand child and adult psychiatric knowledge and services in primary care both local and global by partnering with collaborative minds. Her primary interests are consultation psychiatry, addressing diversity, preventive and collaborative child and adolescent psychiatry (CAP) care, and global mental health.
Richard Ries, MD
Richard K. Ries, MDis Professor of Psychiatry, Director of the Addictions Division in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at the University of Washington School of Medicine, and Director of the Addiction Treatment Services at Harborview Medical Center in downtown Seattle. Dr. Ries received his undergraduate degree from Stanford, medical degree from Northwestern Medical School and completed his psychiatric residency at the University of Washington, where he was chief resident.
Dr. Ries is board-certified in Psychiatry by the American Board of Psychiatry and Neurology with Added Qualifications in Addiction Psychiatry, and the American Board of Addiction Medicine.A Distinguished Fellow of the American Psychiatric Association and a Fellow of the American Society of Addiction Medicine, he is on the editorial board and a reviewer for several scientific journals and holds a number of research grants from the National Institute of Health. He has published numerous articles and abstracts on topics related to treatment of persons with severe mental illness, with special emphasis on those with co-existing problems with alcohol or drugs, and was the chair and co-chair of TIPS 9 and 42 on Treatment of Persons with Co-occurring Disorders published by the National Center of Substance Abuse Treatment (CSAT). He has active funded research in the areas above, military suicide intervention, addiction and suicide, PTSD, and addictions in Native American populations.He is senior editor of the key reference text Principles of Addiction Medicine (editions IV and V), published by the American Society of Addiction Medicine, and a noted expert in the field of addictions.
Dr. Ries has worked collaboratively with various medical/surgical services at Harborview, and hopes that UW PACC can help primary care providers, especially those more rural-based, to feel and be better prepared to deal with their often difficult patients with mental and/or addictions disorders.
Matthew Schreiber, MD, PhD
Matthew Schreiber, MD, PhD completed the MD/PhD program at Washington University in St. Louis.He comes to integrated care from a fellowship in psychosomatic medicine here at UW and has greatly enjoyed working at the VA where integrated care is a very active and exciting clinical area. He feels his most important work is in education and training of psychiatry residents and developing connections between different disciplines working in mental health care. In five years, he hopes Collaborative Care will have a very prominent role in mental health care in Washington State – as a pioneer in this area – and beyond.
Georganna Sedlar, PhD
Georganna Sedlar, PhD received her PhDin Clinical Psychology from the University of Nebraska, Lincoln.Following her graduate education, she completed her pre-doctoral psychology internship at the Medical University of South Carolina with an emphasis in child trauma. Afterwards, she completed a post-doctoral fellowship at the University of California, Davis CAARE Center, specializing in child maltreatment.The majority of her clinical work has been providing evidence-based practices for maltreated children.Specifically, she is trained in Trauma Focused CBT (TF-CBT) and Parent-Child Interaction Therapy (PCIT).
Currently, she is involved in various training, consultation, and workforce development activities. She teaches graduate level seminars; trains community mental health providers in evidence-based practices for youth through the CBT Plus Initiative; consults for the Foster Care Assessment Program (FCAP); and works at the Foster Care Clinic at Harborview Medical Center where she performs brief evaluations and consultations.She is working on various initiatives to promote the development of a competent workforce available to treat children.She believes her most important work has been teaching clinicians and students how to effectively use evidence-based practices in order to best serve their patients. Five years from now, she hopes that integrated care is considered the standard of care and access to high quality and effective mental services is available to many more patients, particularly in underserved areas.
Ruth Kohen, MD
Ruth Kohen, MD is a geriatric psychiatrist. She received her MD at the Rheinisch-Westfälische Technische Hochschule in Aachen, Germany, before immigrating to the US and completing her training at the University of Washington. She is working in the UW Memory and Brain Wellness Clinic, the UW General Internal Medicine Clinic, and the Mental Health Integration Program (MHIP). She is very enthusiastic about expanding Collaborative Care in the treatment of older patients with co-morbid medical, cognitive, and psychiatric problems. This population of patients has great difficulty gaining access to geriatric psychiatrists, of whom there are too few. At the same time, this challenging patient group is particularly well-served by an integrated approach in which the interplay between their medical and psychiatric problems can be addressed by a team of providers contributing diverse expertise. When not working in the clinic, Dr. Kohen is pursuing her research interests of genetic and gene expression studies in patients with medical and psychiatric co-morbidities.
Robert Hilt, MD
Robert Hilt, MD is a Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Washington and Seattle Children’s Hospital.He was trained as a general pediatrician at the University of Iowaand as an adult and child psychiatrist at the University of Massachusetts.Dr. Hilt has worked as a primary care pediatrician and as a pediatric hospitalist before his current career as a child psychiatrist.Dr. Hilt is the Program Director for the Partnership Access Line (PAL), a child mental health consultation service for primary care providers in both Wyoming and Washington.He is the Program Director for the Medicaid psychiatric Medication Second Opinion Programs of Wyoming, Washington and Alaska, and Multidisciplinary Team (MDT) Psychiatric Consult Service in Wyoming.He serves as a co-chair on the Committee on Collaboration with Medical Professions with the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, has served as the Mental Health Editor for the American Academy of Pediatrics’ PREP-Self Assessment, and serves on the editorial boards for both Pediatric Annals and Psychiatric Annals.