John Kern, MD

Expertise: Primary Care, Integration, Collaborative Care, IMPACT, Physical Health in SMI Populations

John Kern, MD serves as Clinical Professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at the University of Washington.

His work focuses on training and implementation of the collaborative care model, as well as the implementation of team-based, data-driven services to improve disparities in health care for people living with serious mental illness. He was involved with the American Psychiatric Association’s TCPi grant, supporting training in collaborative care to over 3500 psychiatrists and primary care providers across the country, with a special focus on leading a years-long series of learning collaboratives for psychiatric providers on collaborative care.

Prior to his UW appointment, he was for 22 years the Chief Medical Officer at Regional Mental Health Center in Merrillville, IN, where he developed and supervised several integration programs, including two Collaborative Care behavioral health in primary care programs, served as project director for a SAMHSA PBHCI grant providing primary care for a seriously mentally ill population, and developed and served as Chief Medical Officer of a new Federally Qualified Health Center, merged with the CMHC.. He is one of the authors of two American Psychiatric Press textbooks on integrated care for psychiatrists and has published on the care of bipolar disorder in the primary care setting. Other interests include the expansion of scope of the collaborative care model, innovations directed towards improving the psychiatric workplace, and improving the effectiveness of instruction provided to practitioners of collaborative care.