Advancing Equity in Healthcare for Individuals with Serious Mental Illness

Kelly Irwin, MD, MPH

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Dr. Irwin will discuss health disparities for individuals with serious mental illness across the cancer continuum. She will review the development of a model of person-centered collaborative care, including findings from a recent randomized trial, and introduce a coalition dedicated to ensuring mental illness is never a barrier to cancer care.

Dr. Kelly Irwin is an Assistant Professor in Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and a faculty psychiatrist at the Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) Cancer Center and MGH Schizophrenia Program.  She is the founding director of the Collaborative Care and Community Engagement Program, a clinical and research initiative dedicated to improving cancer outcomes for individuals with serious mental illness in the Center for Psychiatric Oncology and Behavioral Sciences at the Mass General Cancer Center.  Dr. Irwin also founded the Engage Initiative, a stakeholder coalition that brings together clinicians, individuals with lived experience of mental illness, caregivers, researchers, and advocates with the goal of ensuring that mental illness is never a barrier to cancer care. Dr. Irwin’s clinical research program investigates why people with serious mental illness including schizophrenia and bipolar disorder are more likely to die from cancer and develops, evaluates, and scales interventions to improve cancer and mental health outcomes across the continuum of cancer care. Dr. Irwin graduated from Harvard University in 2001, Harvard Medical School in 2008, and the Harvard Chan School of Public Health in 2017. Her research has been funded by the National Cancer Institute, the American Cancer Society, and the Patient Centered Outcomes Research Institute. She is the President-Elect of the American Psychosocial Oncology Society.