The Babyscripts project is focused on the integration of technology involving psychoeducation and remote mental health monitoring to improve postpartum mental health care after delivery. The team led by Allison Dempsey, along with a project team in Women’s Behavioral Health (Melissa Kwitowski, Alea Pinch, and Mary Kozloski) involves partnering with babyscripts to enhance its current perinatal mental health educational content, develop a workflow for remote patient screening, and triage/response to positive scores with WBHW care coordinators.

Health Rhythms is a remote patient monitoring that combines traditional symptom checklists/screeners with AI passive monitoring behavioral data from mobile devices to detect worsening of symptoms and enhance care delivery. Working with DOP/UCH/CUI, BBICen is engaging in cycles of iterative refinement to enhance widescale implementation. 

A Brief History

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The Avielle Foundation was created in 2013 by Jennifer Hensel and Jeremy Richman after the death of their daughter Avielle, along with 25 of her peers and educators in the tragic shootings at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, CT. The Foundation emerged as a leader in building compassion and violence prevention by funding research, educational programs, events, and helping to train the next generation of scientists. The Avielle Foundation has benefited countless individuals and communities, especially those living in and around Newtown. The tragedy was further compounded by Jeremy’s death in 2019. To ensure Avielle’s name and legacy live on, the foundation formed a new partnership, with the University of Colorado, Anschutz Campus in 2020, establishing the Avielle Initiative, and now under the Brain and Behavior Innovation Center at CU Anschutz. The partnership between The partnership between CU Anschutz and the Avielle Foundation grew out of the recognition that our organizations approach work with deep passion, enduring hope, and unflinching dedication. We share a belief that real change can happen when organizations and communities work together to develop and implement science-driven solutions to promote brain health, create compassion and ultimately reduce violence. 

Avielle Initiative Seed Grant for Brain Health Research and Innovation 

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In 2023 the Brain and Behavior Innovation Center in the Department of Psychiatry launched the first annual call for proposal for the Avielle Initiative Seed Grant for Brain Health Research and Innovation. The grant supports cutting-edge brain health research across all stages of the translational science spectrum that will further Avielle’s legacy and goals of building compassion and/or preventing violence.

Applicant Eligibility & Application

The Jeremy Richman Brain Health Internship and Fellowship 

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We support the careers of young scientists through the endowment of the Jeremy Richman Brain Health Internship and Fellowship. Young scientists interested in brain health will inform the development of technology products and programs focused on building compassion and preventing violence. The internship will be awarded annually to an applicant of PURPLE whose interests and research activities align with and honor the mission of the Avielle Initiative. 

Applicant Eligibility & Application

Visit our page about the Avielle Initiative 

Support the Avielle Initiative Here

The Measurement-Assisted Care (MAC) program is an interdisciplinary quality improvement effort to increase the use of measurement-based care in Department of Psychiatry outpatient clinics. Measurement-based care is the use of repeated patient-reported outcome measures (PROMs) to inform treatment at the level of the individual patient. It is widely regarded as a best practice in mental health care.

In MAC, patients are prompted to complete regular questionnaires about their mental health in the online patient portal before their clinic visits. This data becomes available to clinicians in the Electronic Medical Record for use during visits.

Andy Novick, MD, PhD is an assistant professor focused on understanding the effects of sex steroids on the brain, and evaluating novel drug therapies for psychiatric disorders, specifically psychedelics. He is currently leading a clinical trial investigating psilocybin, the active compound in magic mushrooms, as a treatment for treatment-resistant depression. The trial involves administering either a psychedelic dose or a placebo to participants, with outcomes measured through functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and assessments of depression severity. This study aims to better understand how psilocybin can help patients who have not responded to traditional treatments.

About Our Program

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The goal of the CIBH+ program is to increase access to behavioral health and psychiatry services for Medicaid patients at the Department of Family Medicine’s and CU Medicine’s Family Medicine practices. This approach is accomplished through virtual, and in-person integrated behavioral health services utilizing a hybrid model of in-person and virtual team-based care in collaboration with Department of Family Medicine, the Helen and Arthur E Johnson Depression Center (JDC), and the Department of Psychiatry.

Our program uses a model of a stepped-care approach (increasing behavioral health intervention matched with patient need) to behavioral health, offering on-site and tele-behavioral health screening, triage, assessment, and definitive management. These services are enhanced with tele-psychiatry, which provides psychiatric assessment, guidance, treatment planning, and consultation via phone, email, electronic health record review and videoconferencing to the on-sight team including both direct encounters (patient visits) and indirect encounters (provider to provider) collaborative consultation.

Our program also incorporates an evaluation component to determine outcomes of patient population, explore the cost benefits of the treatment program, how the treatment team interacts as a team, and overall patient experience.

Leadership Team

• Jay Shore, MD, MPH: Program Director

• Corey Lyon, DO: Medical Director 

• Jodi Holtrop, PhD: Evaluation Director, Professor and Vice Chair for Research

• Jacqueline Calderone, MD Director of Telepsychiatry Colorado Integrated Behavioral Health + Program, Department of Psychiatry

• Shandra Brown Levey, PhD Director of Behavioral Health and Integrated Programs for the Department of Family Medicine

• Shannon McWilliams, MA: Program Manager

Clinical Team 

Psychiatry Team 

• Debra Solomon, MD

• Lea Watson, MD

• Lucas Coppes, MD

• David Brown, MD

• Kaylin Klie, MD

• Jodi Zik, MD

• Olga Gorshkalova, MD

• Joshua Crosbie-Cockroft, MD-Fellow

Psychology Team 

• Angelo Alago, PsyD

• Sarah Beckmann, PsyD

• Aaron Bergman, PhD

• Lynn Haley, PsyD

• Gesa Kohlmeier, PsyD

• Marisa Kostiuk, PhD

• Ryan Poling, PhD

• Christie Thrash, PsyD

• Lauren Tolle, PhD, Assistant Director of Behavioral Health and Integrated Programs for the Department of Family Medicine

• Jeremy Stevenson, PsyD Psychologist

• Joanna Stratton, PhD Psychologist

Evaluation Team 

Visit our page about CIBH+