Kirsten Salmela is a psychiatrist, acting instructor, and the current population mental health and integrated care fellow at UW. She is board certified in both adult and child-and-adolescent psychiatry. Her clinical and research interests include working with primary care physicians through an integrated care model and working with intergenerational family systems including perinatal and infant/early childhood populations. She has completed research, lectures, and publications regarding how to best support parents during the transition to parenthood and how to expand the infant/early childhood mental health workforce. She also is interested in quality improvement initiatives to continually better our healthcare system and increase mental healthcare access and equity.
Education:
- Population Mental Health and Integrated Care Fellowship, University of Washington, 2024-2025
- Child and Adolescent Psychiatry Fellowship, Seattle Children’s Hospital/University of Washington, 2022-2024
- Adult Psychiatry Residency, MedStar Georgetown University Hospital, 2019-2022
- Medical School (MD), Michigan State University College of Human Medicine, 2015-2019
Kimiko “Koko” Urata, MD, MS, was a member of the inaugural psychiatry residency class at University of Washington, Montana Track, located in Billings, Montana. Her interests lie in rural underserved mental health, team-based care, and education.
Growing up in Southeast Alaska, she developed a passion for community, team-based care, and rural mental health. She received her medical degree at University of Washington, Alaska WWAMI (Washington, Wyoming, Alaska, Montana, Idaho). She was selected for the WWAMI Rural Integrated Training Experience in Alaska and her interest in rural mental health began. During medical school, she earned the University of Washington School of Medicine Service Award based on her dedication to community service and the Underserved Pathway Certificate for her commitment in caring for underserved and vulnerable populations.
Dr. Urata was drawn to integrated care during residency due to the interdisciplinary, team-based approach to improve access to mental health care. She hopes to build upon her knowledge of psychiatry and gain expertise in quality improvement, systems of care, and population-based medicine. Clinically, she also has interests in perinatal care, psychotherapy, and palliative care. She is excited to be a part of the Population Mental Health and Integrated Care Fellowship and aims to expand access to mental health to rural and underserved communities in Alaska.
Jessica Whitfield, MD, MPH, serves as an Acting Assistant Professor in the Psychiatry & Behavioral Sciences at the University of Washington School of Medicine. She is a psychiatric consultant for the UW’s Behavioral Health Integration Program (BHIP) and the Outpatient Psychiatric Clinic at the UW Medical Center. She also is a co-director of the Psychiatric Consultant Learning Collaborative and provides program assistance for the Integrated Care Training Program Fellowship as a clinical supervisor and co-coordinator for the implementation, quality improvement, and collaborative care rotations. She received her medical degree from Saint Louis University School of Medicine and her Masters of Public Health from Columbia University. She completed her residency in General Adult Psychiatry at Brown University as well as the Integrated Care Training Program Fellowship at UW.
Angela Argyropoulos, MD, obtained her medical degree at the University of Michigan Medical School, and did her residency at the University of Washington. During her residency training, was first drawn to integrated care during a rotation in which she worked in a mental health clinic co-located within a primary care clinic. She particularly enjoyed collaborating with the clinical team, including the primary care physicians and psychologists, as well as teaching within this role. She later chose to do a BHIP rotation and has enjoyed reaching a broad range of individuals in need of mental health care through the collaborative care model.
Dr. Argyropoulos also particularly enjoys psychotherapy and feels that working as a psychiatric consultant is an excellent complement to psychotherapy work, as this role provides a way to serve a larger number of patients in the greater community while continuing to work in a team.
Dr. Argyropoulos believes that increasing access to psychiatric care and taking a team-based, interdisciplinary approach in supporting our primary care colleagues in providing mental health treatment are particularly meaningful aspects of her work. She is hopeful that collaborative care will continue to grow throughout the country and improve availability of mental health services to those most in need.
Caitlin Rippey, MD, PhD, completed her medical degree as well as PhD on the genetic basis of schizophrenia at the University of Washington. She then went on to psychiatry residency training there as well and will be a fellow in the integrated care training program.
From growing up in West Africa, to caring for underserved populations in clinical training, to doing anti-racism community organizing, she has been aware of how structural and systemic factors influence health and access to quality, culturally competent care.
The integrated care training program offers a way to combine her interests in systems of care, social justice, clinical care and research, within a team-based approach geared towards expanding access to mental health care.
She is committed to expanding mental health services in rural western Washington state, and sees integrated care that is responsive to individual communities’ needs as the ideal way to do this.
Ashley Davidson, MD received her medical degree from The Ohio State University and completed her residency at the University of Washington, where she was first exposed to the integrated care model.
Having worked with many patients whose route to psychiatric health had been delayed or disrupted by a history of inadequate care, Dr. Davidson chose to pursue the Integrated Care Fellowship because of her firm belief that psychiatric care should be a cornerstone of well-being. Through the fellowship she hopes to gain both the knowledge needed to comfortably practice psychiatry in an integrated care setting and the expertise to guide other health care systems interested in successfully implementing an integrated care model.
Dr. Davidson’s primary clinical interest is perinatal psychiatry. She is particularly excited to bring integrated care to settings working with peripartum women facing emergent or long-standing mental illness, as these patients benefit strongly from well-managed psychiatric care and are often high-risk cases where proper intervention will make a significant difference in outcomes. She additionally enjoys psychotherapy, and although she will likely be working predominately in integrated care in the future, she plans to carve out some time to practice in the traditional psychiatric model.
Joseph Baldwin, MD received his medical degree from the University of Michigan and will complete his residency at the University of Washington in June 2018.
Throughout his rotations at UW, Dr. Baldwin was drawn to several different fellowship opportunities. After doing his leadership elective during his third year he became more interested in quality improvement and population-based medicine. He realized that the Integrated Care Fellowship combined his love of teaching, the role of a consulting psychiatrist, team-based patient care, the role of quality improvement, and population-based medicine to increase access to care.
Dr. Baldwin believes that increasing access to mental health care and tracking outcomes to ensure better quality of care captures some of integrated care’s most important work. Even within his time in residency, he has seen a huge increase in the interest and push for collaborative care. He sees this trajectory continuing and is excited to be a part of it.
Sara Haack, MD, MPH received her Medical Degree from the University of Michigan, completed her residency at the University of Washington (UW), and has an MPH degree from Johns Hopkins University. Dr. Haack was first exposed to an integrated care model when she did a rotation working in co-located care in a Native health facility in Anchorage, AK.
She chose to pursue the integrated care fellowship at the UW because she is interested in the question of how to efficiently use limited psychiatric resources. Dr. Haack also enjoys Collaborative Care’s involvement in problem solving and analyzing data in an organized way. Her goals during the fellowship are to strengthen her skills as an integrated care clinician as well as to deepen her understanding of new areas to potentially apply the integrated care model.
After the fellowship, she hopes to take her expertise to locations that are aiming to start new integrated care programs and assist them with that process. Her clinical interests include addictions and trauma. Five years from now she sees herself doing many different things and is open to exciting possibilities, including seeing herself thriving on the ground level of a new or recently started integrated care program.
Seeta Patel, MD graduated from medical school at the University of Louisville. Her psychiatry rotation in medical school reinforced a pre-existing interest in mental health.
Before entering her residency, Dr. Patel shadowed her uncle, an obstetrician working in India. When a patient came in describing depressive symptoms and was referred to a psychiatrist who had a waiting list of several months, Dr. Patel’s interest in global health was sparked and it served as a realization of the immense need for mental health services in rural areas which could be achieved via collaboration with primary care.
During her child psychiatry rotation in residency, she had the opportunity to serve as a consultant to pediatricians and found this collaborative approach to be rewarding; it was her first glimpse into the value of an Integrated Care model. Additionally, during her consultation-liaison experience, she valued the multidisciplinary approach and rich discussions with medical teams.
In addition to Collaborative Care, Dr. Patel’s interests include holistic care and alternative treatments, telepsychiatry, and cross-cultural psychiatry. She is attracted to Collaborative Care because she wants to help those living in underserved areas receive better access to care. Dr. Patel sees herself teaching Integrated Care as well as working alongside other team members as a psychiatric consultant in underserved areas, and incorporating telepsychiatry into her consulting work.