Bradford Felker, MD completed a combined Psychiatry-Internal Medicine residency at the University of Virginia leading to board certification in both fields. He joined the faculty at the University of Virginia Department of Psychiatry and began his career at the VA, where he developed one of the first programs to integrate primary care services for patients with mental disorders within a specialty mental health clinic. Based on this work, he was recruited to join the faculty at the UW Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences. He continued his work with the VA in Seattle. He then implemented one of the first integrated care services within the VA. This Primary Care Mental Health Integration Service grew to include the two medical centers and seven community-based outpatient clinics at VA Puget Sound. This program was recognized as one of the top ten programs in the VA. His research has been in the area of developing models of care management, implementation of integrated care programs, and the assessment and treatment of PTSD in primary care. His recent research is focused on studying the implementation of tele-mental health services within primary care. Based on this work, he was asked by the Office of Academic Affiliations within the VA to develop next-generation integrated care curriculum at the seven Center of Excellence for Primary Care Education sites in the VA. As a result of his work with integrated care in rural areas, he developed an interest in tele-mental health. He has implemented an innovative network of tele-mental health services that now link all sites within VA Puget Sound as well as many other sites across the Northwest Region. Dr. Felker believes his most important work is developing care management models in the VA as well as looking at ways to integrate all the emerging tele-technologies (Clinical Video Teleconference [CVT], web-based, apps, etc.) into routine mental health care that is delivered within primary care. Dr. Felker believes that in five years tele-health teams as we currently know them will no longer exist. Mental health providers will routinely use a broad range of these emerging technologies to extend the reach, access, and the types of mental health care delivered in all kinds of new settings.
Staff Type: Faculty
William French, MD
William French, MD attended medical school at the University of Kentucky College of Medicine in Lexington, KY. During his psychiatric residency there, he gained an appreciation for the importance of viewing primary care patients’ concerns through a biopsychosocial lens during a rotation in family medicine. After completing his child and adolescent fellowship at the University of Kentucky, he moved with his family to Seattle to join the faculty in the UW Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences and began working at Seattle Children’s Hospital as an outpatient child psychiatrist. Dr. French supervises fellows at Seattle Children’s Hospital, Odessa Brown Children’s Clinic, and Harborview Medical Center. Additionally, he provides Collaborative Care consultation to Harborview’s outpatient pediatric clinic and to several school-based health centers in the Seattle area. He finds child psychiatry rewarding because it gives him the opportunity to change the health trajectories for young people at an early age before their problems become more intractable. Dr. French’s interests include Collaborative Care, trauma interventions, telepsychiatry, and disruptive behavior disorders. He says that his most important work is helping to improve health care delivery and outcomes for mental health disorders in community-based primary care settings. He believes that every child deserves the opportunity to have a healthy life and meet his or her full potential. What keeps him going is helping his patients reach their goals without mental illness blocking the way. Five years from now, Dr. French hopes that there has been an acceleration and growth in the utilization of Collaborative Care models in primary care, especially for pediatric populations.
Tanya Keeble, MD
Tanya Keeble, MD received her medical degree from the University of London Medical School. She completed a medical and surgical foundation year before specializing in psychiatry at the Royal Free Hospital Psychiatry Training Program. She then spent a year in New Zealand working in first episode psychosis and community psychiatry before completing a psychiatry residency at the University of Washington Psychiatry Training Program: Spokane Track.
She arrived in Collaborative Care through the UW Mental Health Integration Program (MHIP) program in 2010, and worked as a Collaborative Care psychiatrist in a community health center in Spokane for 5 years, before moving her focus to training residents in the Collaborative Care setting. She considers Collaborative Care to be one of her three career passions, with the other two being psychotherapyand residency education. She maintains a psychotherapy practice in intensive short-term dynamic therapy and firmly believes that psychiatrists should continue to develop skills in psychotherapy as well as medication treatment. She teaches and educates residents and medical students in her role as Program Director for Psychiatry Residency Spokane, a residency training program thatgrew out of the Spokane Track of the UW program from which she graduated.
She is attracted to Collaborative Care because of its focus on outcome-based treatment, commitment to education of both the patient and the primary care provider, strong teamwork focus, and stepped treatment so that the patients who are the sickest and often most disenfranchised get the care that they need. Five years from now, she hopes that Collaborative Care is both financially self-sustainingand the standard of care across the US for patients in the primary care setting.
Ramanpreet Toor, MD
Ramanpreet Toor, MD attended medical school at Russian State Medical University in Moscow, Russia. Dr. Toor did her residency at Baystate Medical Center, Tufts University School of Medicine, and did the psychosomatic medicine fellowship at Cambridge Health Alliance (CHA), Harvard Medical School. During the fourth year of her residency, she worked in two primary care clinics as a psychiatric consultant following a co-located model. She was overloaded with patients and her schedule was quickly booked for months. She started a new resident consultation clinic in order to see more patients but still struggled with the same problem.While trying to figure out how to be more efficient she learned about Collaborative Care.
During her fellowship she worked in three primary care clinics as a psychiatric consultant following a co-located model and was part of a team that started Collaborative Care at CHA. Dr. Toor is currently faculty at the University of Washington (UW), working as a psychiatric consultant for the UW’s Behavioral Health Integration Program (BHIP) in primary care clinics, and is also a psychiatric consultant for the WA perinatal consultant line and WA psychiatry consult line.
She is the program director of the Population Mental Health and Integrated Care Fellowship (Integrated Care Training Program). She is leading the teaching curriculum on Integrated Psychiatric Care with a focus on the Collaborative Care Model (CoCM) for the UW psychiatry residency. She is also leading the online didactic curriculum for fellows (Consult-Liaison, Geriatric Psychiatry, and Community-Based Fellowship).
Her interests include women’s health, mood disorders, and learning more about Collaborative Care. She says that on difficult days, the thing that keeps her going is the satisfaction of knowing that she is helping people.
Five years from now Dr. Toor anticipates that Collaborative Care will be in more primary care clinics in Washington. She hopes that with time and experience primary care providers will feel more and more comfortable treating different behavioral health conditions.
David Kopacz, MD
David Kopacz, MD lectures in the didactic seminars for ICTP. He graduated from University of Illinois at Chicago for medical school and psychiatric residency. His first job was at Omaha VA and University of Nebraska, which was followed by work in a number of different practice settings, including private practice, rural community mental health, and multi-specialty group practice. Dr. Kopacz served as Clinical Director of Buchanan Psychiatric Rehabilitation Centre in Auckland, New Zealand for several years, prior to moving to Seattle. Since 2014, David has been at Seattle Division of Puget Sound VA working in Primary Care Mental Health Integration with an Acting Assistant Professor appointment in the Clinician Teacher track at University of Washington. Dr. Kopacz is board certified through the American Board of Psychiatry and Neurology as well as the American Board of Integrative & Holistic Medicine and the newly formed American Board of Integrative Medicine. Dr. Kopacz published his first book in 2014, Re-humanizing Medicine: A Holistic Framework for Transforming Your Self, Your Practice, and the Culture of Medicine, and his next book, published in2016, isWalking the Medicine Wheel: Healing Trauma & PTSD, with co-author Joseph Rael (Beautiful Painted Arrow). He has always been interested in whole-person, holistic treatments and delivery systems, and Collaborative Care seemed like a logical extension of that work. Dr. Kopacz thinks that his most important work has been bringing creative, whole-person approaches to working with veterans and staff. He has helped start a Whole Health Class for veterans, which has been a great tool for engaging with Primary Care staff as well and has had some staff wellness applications. He believes that Collaborative Care looks to be a growing field, on its way to becoming mainstream psychiatry.
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.
Anna Ratzliff, MD, PhD
Anna Ratzliff, MD, PhD received her MD and PhD from the University of California, Irvine. She completedher residency at the University of Washington. While completing her residency, she found an appreciation for doing clinical work and helping patients. While Dr. Ratzliff was chief resident, she discovered that she enjoyed working in education as well.
Dr. Ratzliff’s first job out of residency was in the collaborative care field where shewas able to work with patients, in teams, and in education. Integrated care began to grow from a few cities to statewide, and she was asked to develop teaching materials. She is currently working on expanding training incollaborative care within Washington State, as well as with the American Psychiatry Association to educate 10% of all psychiatrists in the U.S. in this method.
Dr. Ratzliff believes that her work with the APA is the most influential work that she has done in her career and hopes that it will help the most patients. Five years from now, Dr. Ratzliff hopes that most people will be able to access collaborative care.
Amy Bauer, MD, MS
Amy Bauer MD, MS attended medical school at the University of California, San Francisco and University of California, Berkeley. While getting her medical degree, she found inspiration in her interest in public health and health care and applied that interest to psychiatry. During her residency at Massachusetts General Hospital, she spent elective time in South Australia where she discovered a need for psychiatrists to support local providers in underserved and isolated locations. Shecompleted a clinical fellowship in Psychosomatic Medicine and research training in Health Care Policy and Primary Care Psychiatry at the University of Washington.
Her interests include primary care psychiatry, mobile health, health disparities, and health services research. She has worked as a psychiatric consultant for clinics in the Behavioral Health Integration Program (BHIP) and state-wide Mental Health Integration Program (MHIP). She says that her work is centered on people and relationships; not just patients, but also team relationships and the community of committed people who want to improve and practice care in new ways. Five years from now, Dr. Bauer hopes that collaborative care is continuing to better use the technological tools we have to improve the way that care is delivered.
Mark Duncan, MD
Mark Duncan, MD is interested in working with fellows on addiction treatment in primary care settings. He attended medical school at Rush University where he developed an interest in co-occuring disorders. Dr. Duncan completed two separate residencies: one in family medicine at West Suburban Medical Center, and one in psychiatry at the University of Washington, where he was also a fellow in the UW Addiction Psychiatry Fellowship Program.
Hecurrently works in an outpatient psychiatry clinic with general psychiatry patients, consults in addiction psychiatry, is a consultant for both the Behavioral Health Integration Program (BHIP) and Mental Health Integration Program (MHIP),works on the Harm Reduction with Pharmacotherapy (HARP) study in alcohol abuse and homelessness, and works with family medicine residents to improve their training in mental health work. He loves his work because it is interesting, there is opportunity to help people and improve lives, and there are opportunities for innovation and creativity. Five years from now, he hopes that collaborative care has stretched to better treat addictions and opiate use to fill the need and potential within that field.
Denise Chang, MD
Denise Chang, MD completed her medical degree at the University of Iowa and then went on to complete residency training in psychiatry at the University of Washington. She then did further training as a Psychosomatic Medicine Fellow, also at the University of Washington, and this is where she had her first experience working in collaborative care, doing a rotation with Dr. Anna Ratzliff. Following fellowship, she joined the faculty working in the Behavioral Health Integration Program, which at the time was a new collaborative care initiative at the University of Washington, working in primary care clinics providing mental health consultation.
She has helped launch two collaborative care programs, one in the UW Neighborhood clinic system and another at a primary care site within UW Medicine. For ICTP, she organizes the clinical rotations for the fellows as well as helps provide support to the clinical faculty that supervise the fellows.She also works on quality improvement projects within collaborative care as well as helping the fellows learn about quality improvement.
Dr. Chang believes that her most important work is ensuring patients are receiving quality mental health care and promoting collaborative care as a means to improving access to mental health to all patients. She hopes that in the future, that there will be improvements in our health care system to allow for even more efficient use of our mental health resources, and to improve access to that care so that more patients are being reached, leading to improved clinical outcomes.