Transforming Mental Healthcare: Applying Performance Improvement Methods to Mental Healthcare

About the Author

Sunil Khushalani, MD, is a psychiatrist who specializes in Addiction Psychiatry. He is passionate about learning improvement science and integrating it into the field of mental health and addictions. This book is his first on the subject of improvement science as applied to mental health. For the last decade, he worked on teaching and integrating these ideas and methods at Sheppard Pratt. He obtained his MBBS degree from Seth Gordhandas Sunderdas Medical College/ King Edward Memorial Hospital in Mumbai, India. He then completed his residency at the Department of Psychiatry at New York University Medical Center/Bellevue Hospital in 1997 and came to Sheppard Pratt in 2000. He is board-certified in Psychiatry by the American Board of Psychiatry and Neurology. He is also certified by examination by the American Board of Addiction Medicine. He was recently serving as the Medical Director of Adult Services at Sheppard Pratt and the Service Chief of the Inpatient Co-occurring Disorders Unit at the Towson Campus of Sheppard Pratt. He also served as a physician advisor for the Stanley Research Group and the Operational Excellence team at Sheppard Pratt. Now, he works as the Chief Medical Officer for Kolmac Outpatient Recovery Centers. He is also an Assistant Professor at the University of Maryland School of Medicine, and he has always maintained an interest in training psychiatry residents. He helped develop a course on 'Lean Problem Solving' at Sheppard Pratt and taught performance improvement to staff and psychiatry residents in the Sheppard Pratt System. He is a Distinguished Fellow of the American Psychiatric Association and a Fellow of the American Society of Addiction Medicine. He has been voted as a Top Doctor in Addiction Psychiatry by Castle Connolly and Baltimore Magazine. He has conducted workshops and delivered many presentations on performance improvement in mental health at many regional, national and international meetings. 　 Antonio DePaolo, PhD, is a transformation executive and a Baldrige Fellow with over 22 years of experience in improvement science. This is his first book on improvement science applied to mental health and highlights his implementation work over more than seven years at Sheppard Pratt. Before that, Antonio spent 16 years in several industries, from automotive and transportation to life science and semiconductor packaging. He most recently ventured into healthcare by joining the University of Maryland Medical System as the Vice President of Transformation and Continuous Improvement for Upper Chesapeake Health. Antonio earned his B.S. in Industrial Engineering and Masters of Industrial Engineering from the University at Buffalo. He later completed his formal education with a Doctorate of Philosophy in Management with a focus on leadership and organizational change from Walden University. Throughout his career, Antonio had several mentors, including being mentored by Japanese Sensei while leading improvement efforts at a division of The Stanley Works located in Rhode Island. His major accomplishment was the full transformation of Wabash National, a struggling trailer manufacturer in Lafayette, Indiana, where he developed the manufacturing systems and laid the groundwork for improvement. As a result of his work, the company returned to revenue growth and profitability by removing a cumulative cost burden in excess of $250M and led to the organization winning The U.S. Senate productivity excellence award presented by Senator Richard Lugar. Antonio has volunteered his time to speak at local, national, and international settings and the American Psychiatric Association.