Jürgen Unützer, MD, MPH, MA is an internationally recognized psychiatrist and health services researcher. His work focuses on innovative models that integrate mental health and general medical services and on translating research on evidence-based behavioral health interventions into effective clinical and public health practice. He has over 200 scientific publications and is the recipient of numerous federal and foundation grants and awards for his research to improve the health and mental health of populations through patient-centered integrated mental health services.
Dr. Unützer trained in Public Policy (MA, University of Chicago), Medicine (MD, Vanderbilt University) and Public Health (MPH, University of Washington). He completed fellowships in Geriatric Psychiatry at UCLA and in Primary Care Psychiatry / Health Services Research at the University of Washington. He is a professor in the University of Washington’s Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences and Chair of the department.
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.
Kari Stephens, PhD is a licensedclinical psychologist, Professor in the Department of Family Medicine. She earned her PhD at UW. Her work focuses on dissemination of evidence-based behavioral practices (EBPs) integrated behavioral health primary care care settings through research, training, and data science methods. She believes primary care provides a way to reach the vast majority of people and that EBPs can have huge population impact if we can successfully disseminate them. Her clinical expertise includes treating trauma, depression, anxiety, chronic pain, and addiction. Dr. Stephens is a panelist for the UW PACC weekly case consultation series, leads the Integrated Primary Care Track for the Psychology Internship Program, and conducts research spanning the use of electronic health data and integrated behavioral health to improve care particularly in disadvantaged populations.
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.
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.
Barbara McCann, PhD received her PhD in clinical psychology from Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey. She is a Professor in UW;s Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, as well as a clinical psychologist with expertise in hypnosis. She holds the Mental Health Counseling and Hypnosis Endowed Chair at UW. She supports ICTP’s brief behavioral interventions curriculum and provides individual supervision to the fellows.
Dr. McCann has worked with patients from primary care clinics at Harborview Medical Center for the past 20 years, drawing on brief behavioral interventions to address anxiety, depression, and related problems. She considers her most important work to be her study of adherence to medical regimens for the past 30 years, across a variety of medical conditions and health behaviors. In the future, she would like to see more primary care settings providing access to brief psychotherapies for their patients.
Mark Newman, MD attended the University of Florida for medical school and completed residency at the University of Michigan. During training, he particularly enjoyed inpatient consultation and the opportunity to collaborate with non-psychiatrists on treating medically and mentally ill patients. Dr. Newman completed a fellowship in Psychosomatic Medicine at Northwestern University working primarily in an inpatient setting. His long-standing interest in integrating systems of care and reducing inefficiencies is well-suited to the University of Washington’s Collaborative Care model. Dr. Newman currently practices at the Seattle Cancer Care Alliance and consults to two Behavioral Health Integration Program (BHIP) Clinics. He is most attracted to Collaborative Care because it offers a more productive way to provide mental health care. Dr. Newman hopes that Collaborative Care continues to spread to more locations and further leverages and improves mental health in a systematic way.
Katherine Palm-Cruz, MDattended medical school at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences. She was first inspired to pursue psychiatry during a third-year medical school rotation in psychiatry where a patient expressed gratitude to the team for allowing him to regain hope to live. She started a residency at the University of California, Irvine but transferred to the University of Washington, where she found interest in psychopharmacology, perinatal mental health, and integrated care. She currently works in Behavioral Health Integration Program (BHIP) and Mental Health Integration Program (MHIP) clinics. She is attracted to integrated care because she appreciates working with a team and being able to have an impact on the greatest number of patients, especially as a way to serve patients with limited resources and address mental health disparities. She cites her most important work as contributions she is able to make within teaching, especially with collaborative care teams to provide higher quality patient care and better patient outcomes. Five years from now, Dr. Palm-Cruz hopes that integrated care is the standard of care and more present within medicine.
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 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.