Bio Grouping: Core Faculty & Staff
Mark Duncan
Trudy Mossop
Anna Hink
Anna has been providing behavioral health services to adults, families, and adolescents in medical and community-based settings since 2006.
In 2008, she led the implementation of a collaborative care program for pregnant and parenting caregivers at two Federally Qualified Health Care Centers in Seattle, WA. Anna then served as a behavioral health care manager in the Mental Health Integration Program at Country Doctor Community Clinic for 6 years, where she also led DSHS First Steps Maternity Support Services and Infant Case Management Services. Anna has additionally worked as a social worker in large hospital systems where she provided outpatient primary care behavioral health services to adults impacted by HIV/AIDs, delivered inpatient and home-based hospice services, and supported behavioral health services and discharge planning on inpatient units.
Anna joined the AIMS center as a Clinical Trainer in 2018. She enjoys supporting implementation and clinical coaching with local and national groups and often supports programs with a perinatal and/or pediatric focus. She earned her Master of Social Work degree from the University of Washington and an undergraduate degree in International Affairs/Spanish from the University of Puget Sound.
Suzy Hunter
Suzy Hunter joined the AIMS Center in 2011 as Technical Project Manager, overseeing the development of the AIMS Caseload Tracker and Care Management Tracking System (CMTS) software applications.
Suzy enjoys working with clinicians, implementation experts, researchers and developers to design and build better caseload management tools to support collaborative care workflows, most recently focusing on data integration with electronic health records. Suzy has worked at the University of Arizona and University of Washington performing web application development and IT project management since 2002.
Ashley Heald
Ashley is an NAHQ Certified Professional in Healthcare Quality with a BA in Psychology and an MA in Sociology from George Mason University. She has over 12 years of experience in research, dissemination, and support to health care and behavioral health organizations, implementing a variety of evidence-based behavioral health interventions. She has served as a Senior Project Manager for the AIMS Center since 2011 and a Practice Coach since 2014, managing diverse training and technical assistance projects and coaching to a variety of behavioral health conditions, patient populations, and treatment settings. She works with healthcare providers, IT professionals, financial teams, and administrative staff in settings ranging from Rural Health Clinics in Alaska and Montana to large urban healthcare systems in New York City and Los Angeles.
Youlim Choi
Youlim Choi developed the web-based care management system (CMTS) for the original multi-site IMPACT study and since then has developed several subsequent versions of the registry tool to facilitate various research projects and large-scale IMPACT implementations. Mr. Choi maintains the AIMS Center websites and CMTS. He has over 10 years of experience in information technology including network, security, and programming. He received his Master of Arts degree in Mathematics from UCLA.
Jürgen Unützer
Jürgen Unützer, MD, MPH, MA is an internationally recognized psychiatrist and health services researcher. His work focuses on innovative models of care that integrate mental health and general medical services and on translating research on evidence-based mental health care into effective clinical and public health practice. He has more than 300 scholarly 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 is Professor and Chair in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at the University of Washington. He also holds adjunct appointments as Professor in the School of Public Health (Department of Health Services and Department of Global Health) and as Affiliate Investigator at the Group Health Research Institute in Seattle, WA.
Dr. Unützer founded and directed the AIMS Center from 2004 – 2018. He was the principal investigator for the Improving Mood: Providing Access to Collaborative Treatment (IMPACT) trial, which showed that patients receiving IMPACT care (collaborative care) were twice as likely to show improvement than patients in usual care. In recent years, Dr. Unützer’s work has focused on developing local, regional, national, and global partnerships that support workforce development and capacity building in primary and behavioral health care.
He has served as Senior Scientific Advisor to the World Health Organization and as an advisor to the President’s New Freedom Commission on Mental Health. He works with national and international organizations to improve behavioral health care for diverse populations. His awards include the Beeson Physician Faculty Scholars Award from the American Foundation for Aging Research, the Klerman Junior and Senior Investigator Awards from the Depression and Bipolar Support Alliance, the Distinguished Scientist Award from the American Association of Geriatric Psychiatry, the Research Award from the Academy of Psychosomatic Medicine, and the Senior Health Services Scholar Award from the American Psychiatric Association.
Dr. Unützer trained in Medicine (MD, Vanderbilt University), Public Policy (MA, University of Chicago), and Public Health / Health Services (MPH, University of Washington). He completed fellowships in Geriatric Psychiatry at UCLA and in Primary Care Psychiatry at the University of Washington.
Amy Bauer
Amy Bauer, MD, MS is an assistant professor in the Department of Psychiatry & Behavioral Sciences at the University of Washington. She is a psychiatric consultant for the University of Washington’s primary-care based Behavioral Health Integration Program (BHIP) and Washington State’s Mental Health Integration Program (MHIP), and co-director of the UW Integrated Care Pathway: Psychiatry in Medical Settings, a program within the Division of Integrated Care and Public Health for Psychiatry residents.
Dr. Bauer has research training in Health Care Policy and in Primary Care Psychiatry and is the recipient of an NCRR-funded Career Development award through the Institute of Translational Health Sciences at University of Washington. Her current research focuses on understanding and addressing health literacy barriers to self-management for people with chronic diseases, with an emphasis on the use of technology to support patient self-management and the delivery of evidence-based mental health services. Dr. Bauer attended medical school at the UC Berkeley / UCSF Joint Medical Program and has completed Psychiatry residency at Massachusetts General Hospital and McLean Hospital and a fellowship in Psychosomatic Medicine at Cambridge Health Alliance and is board certified in Psychiatry and in Psychosomatic Medicine.
John Fortney
Dr. Fortney was trained as a geographer, with an emphasis on spatial economics and econometrics. As a post doctoral fellow, he became the second geographer ever to receive research funding from NIMH. Throughout his career, Dr. Fortney’s research has focused on identifying and overcoming barriers to mental health care for rural populations. Dr. Fortney has used geographic information systems (GIS) to measure travel times to services and to determine the impact of geographical accessibility on utilization and quality. He has also evaluated the impact of opening new VA Community Based Outpatient Clinics in rural areas on veterans’ access and service utilization. More recently, Dr. Fortney has begun developing and disseminating telemedicine-based interventions to improve care for rural primary care patients. Specifically, Dr. Fortney has been using telemedicine technologies (telephones, interactive video, electronic medical records, web-based decision support systems) to help provide team-based collaborative care within a virtual clinical environment, where patients, physicians, therapists, and care mangers are separated from one another by distance.