Recognizing Research, Achievement, and Distinguished Service
Two of ACLP’s 2022 awards will be presented today.
DON R. LIPSITT AWARD
DON R. LIPSITT AWARD for ACHIEVEMENT IN INTEGRATED & COLLABORATIVE CARE—Established in 2014, this award recognizes an individual who has demonstrated excellence and innovation in the integration of mental health with other medical care through collaborative care.
Winner: Elizabeth Lowdermilk, MD
Nominator: Kenneth Lovoa, MD
Dr. Lowdermilk has been at the forefront of implementing integrated care throughout a safety-net system in Denver since 2011—a city-wide network of Community Health Clinics that are Federally Qualified Health Centers. Of patients receiving care at these clinics, 70-80% have public or no insurance. A typical clinic has 10-15 primary care providers who serve about 12-20,000 patients.
In 2011, Dr. Lowdermilk implemented a University of Washington Collaborative Care Model into four of these clinics serving approximately 60,000 adult outpatients every year. From 2012 to 2015, she was the lead psychiatrist expanding this model to four additional clinics. Additionally, she helped establish an innovative reverse integration clinic housed within Denver’s community mental health center. From 2013 to present, Dr. Lowdermilk has been the lead psychiatrist overseeing the expansion of this model into nine primary care clinics, three pediatric clinics, three women’s care clinics, and one intensive outpatient clinic. These clinics serve more than 150,000 patients annually.
Each year at least 10 trainees rotate through these integrated behavioral health sites, including Psychiatry residents, C-L Psychiatry fellows, and medical students.
Additionally, Dr. Lowdermilk helped craft and implement the behavioral health component of the Longitudinal Integrated Curriculum (LIC) into these sites. The LIC is a novel medical school curriculum at the University of Colorado designed to give students the opportunity to follow patients longitudinally across health care systems and, in this way, to have a patient-centered experience.
Nominator Dr. Lovoa says: “Dr. Lowdermilk’s work to integrate behavioral health into community health clinics since 2011 has now made behavioral health care available to more than a million patients, most of whom are experiencing poverty and are from under-represented minority groups. In addition, she has trained dozens of medical professionals who have taken this collaborative care model to sites across the country. Dr. Lowdermilk’s contributions to integrated care are profound.”
WAYNE KATON RESEARCH AWARD
WAYNE KATON RESEARCH AWARD—The award recognizes a currently active researcher in the field of psychopathology in the medically ill.
Winner: Judith Rosmalen, PhD
Nominator: James Levenson, MD, FACLP
Nominator Dr. Levenson says: “Dr. Rosmalen is fascinated by the classical problem of how body and mind relate, and how integrating knowledge on them can transform medicine from a disease-oriented field to a patient-centric approach. Her research is aimed at finding answers to a wide range of questions at the crossroads of body and mind, covering the life course from birth to old age.
“These questions include how early life experiences related to the body and illness influence how people cope with symptoms throughout their lives; which biopsychosocial characteristics make adolescents and adults prone to develop functional symptoms and somatic symptom disorders; how and why do somatic and psychiatric disease co-occur in adulthood; how do psychological factors contribute to functional movement disorders; and how can somatic symptom disorders be diagnosed and treated.”
Among a multitude of innovative studies, and driven by her ambition to improve care for individual patients, Dr. Rosmalen developed and studied new eHealth solutions for functional symptoms and somatic symptom disorders. All her research findings accumulate in her eHealth toolbox Grip, which supports health care professionals and patients with somatic symptom disorder with a set of empirically based tools.
Grip creates a patient profile identifying risk and perpetuating factors; collects diary data, and analyzes individual patterns of symptom fluctuations; and constructs a patient-tailored psychotherapy based on these data. It also supports the health care professional and the patient by providing an e-learning focused on communication and patient information and education. Grip is available for health care professionals in the Netherlands (www.grip.health).
To improve care for patients with functional symptoms, Dr. Rosmalen also developed an accredited interprofessional e-learning which has been followed by more than 800 health care professionals in the Netherlands—and implemented in national training for psychiatrists and general practitioners, and in local training for residents in internal medicine, gynecology and neurology.