Technology

1. Identify, explore, and develop promising technological innovations and approaches to enhance care for testing, refinement, wider dissemination, and implementation.
2. Foster campus-wide infrastructure (e.g., Measurement-Assisted Care and Learning Management Systems) to amplify innovation design, implementation, and evaluation.
3. Serve as a nimble partner for CU Innovations stakeholders to drive regional and national impact on mental health care.

Novel Therapeutics

1. Promote innovations in novel therapeutics (e.g., drug development, neuromodulation) across the translational spectrum.
2. Collaborate with industry partners to identify and move promising compounds that can positively impact mental health from bench to bedside.
3. Create a focus on psychedelic therapies, including lab research and clinical services to advance the potential of psychedelic agents.

Care Redesign

1. Integrate innovations into the mental health system to redesign care delivery by improving patient access, outcomes, and experience while simultaneously; reducing costs; and improving provider experience.
2. Collaborate with the other two pillars to incorporate technologies and therapeutics into novel and scalable models of care to enhance access to effective prevention approaches and interventions.
3. Evaluate and improve current care strategies by incorporating promising care innovations for wider dissemination and integration in treatment systems.

BBICen leaders are in the final stages of establishing a collaboration between BBICen and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center to launch a new program in their digital clinic. This initiative will integrate mindLAMP, a mental health application indexed by the World Health Organization's Digital Health Atlas, into a telehealth treatment program for depression and anxiety. This initiative aims to enhance patient monitoring and improve treatment outcomes through tech-enabled care.

Babyscripts

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.

Avielle Initiative and Jeremy Richman

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 and Jeremy Richman Initiative

Measurement-Assisted Care (MAC)

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.

Psilocybin

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.

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.

Brain and Behavior Innovation Center Contact

BBICen@cuanschutz.edu

Tereza Guedes, PhD : BBICen Innovations Program Manager
Rosalia Lotspeich, MA : Program Coordinator

Department of Psychiatry
University of Colorado
Anschutz  Health and Sciences Building
1890 N Revere Ct. Suite 4003
Mail Stop F546
Aurora CO 80045