Katherine Watkins still thinks about the women she met years ago as a young psychiatrist working at a residential treatment center. They were fighting drug addictions — but they were also struggling with serious mental health problems at the same time. They were some of the sickest patients she had ever met.
Watkins is now a senior physician policy researcher at RAND. She’s leading an effort in New Mexico to transform the care of people like those women. If it’s successful — and the early numbers look promising — it will provide a new model for helping patients who otherwise might disappear into cracks in the American health care system.