Laura Collins, MSW, LICSW

Senior Principal

Health Management Associates

Los Angeles, CA

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(213) 314-9099

Laura Collins is a licensed clinical social worker with 25 years of experience in hospital, emergency room and clinic patient care; hospital administration; and systems-level roles in psychiatry and behavioral health. She worked directly in inpatient and outpatient psychiatric programming and operations with experience in project implementation and regulatory readiness for these areas.

At Health Management Associates (HMA), Laura serves as director for the Community Assistance, Recovery and Empowerment Act (CARE-Act.org) Training and Technical Assistance (TTA) project, which provides TTA to the entire state of California, supporting successful implementation of this new outpatient civil commitment law to persons with serious mental illness. Laura has also been extensively involved in supporting CalAIM implementation, specifically the Enhanced Care Management (ECM) benefit and Community Supports (CS) programs, at multiple levels, including at the provider and Community Based Organization (CBO), county, and Medi-Cal Managed Care Plan (MCP) levels.

Before joining HMA, Laura was interim chief operating officer for Del Amo Hospital, a freestanding psychiatric hospital in Torrance, California. The hospital provided psychiatric care to children, youth, and adults across the continuum, including acute inpatient, detoxification services, partial hospitalization, and intensive outpatient programs. She provided oversight of daily inpatient and outpatient hospital operations with a focus on facility operations, regulatory, voluntary and involuntary intake, clinical services, pharmacy, and risk management and compliance.

Laura is experienced in both public and private sector settings. Prior to her work with Del Amo, she worked for 20 years with Harborview Medical Center in Seattle, most recently as a behavioral health administrator. She oversaw all civil commitment/involuntary treatment processes for the acute/intensive care psychiatric units and psychiatric emergency services. Laura provided oversight of regulatory preparation specific to psychiatry and supported inpatient and outpatient psychiatric program development and training, with a focus on evidence-based models of care.

Also at Harborview, Laura also developed and managed behavioral health integration programs across the Harborview and UW Medicine Neighborhood clinic system. She published an article on the behavioral health integration program model, Integrating Behavioral Health into Primary Care, Population Health Management, September 2015.

Laura’s work at the systems level – city, county, and state – spans cross-sector involvement beyond hospitals in the region to include crisis services, law enforcement, forensic programs and corrections. She participated on key task forces related to psychiatric capacity, the psychiatric boarding crisis in Washington state, and the evaluation and treatment of mentally ill offenders.

She earned her master’s degree in social work from the University of Washington and her bachelor’s degree in sociology and anthropology from Seattle Pacific University.