Bill’s dedication to working with under-resourced families and communities led to a great collaboration with the Harborview Children and Teen Clinic where he came weekly, along with residents in psychiatry, to see our children and teens who could not get psychiatric services in the community as Medicaid did not cover behavioral health services.

This effort established one of the first models of “integrated” health care in pediatrics where patients could get behavioral care and medical care at the same site.

Many of our families were immigrants and mental health conditions did not have cultural acceptance or understanding. I well remember one Ethiopian family whose teen started to have hallucinations and aberrant behavior. The family thought that they might be possessed by supernatural beings. Bill saw the teen and diagnosed schizophrenia and clearly explained the condition and got them and the teen to agree to try medications. It made a transformation in his behavior within a few weeks.