TeleBehavioral Health Webinar, September, 19 2025

Chris Buresh, MD, MPH, DTM&H

Dr. Buresh is an emergency medicine physician and pediatrician. He sees patients at Harborview Medical Center and Seattle Children’s Hospital. His focus is on optimizing the care of adult and pediatric populations when they have acute time-sensitive injuries or illnesses. He also has an interest in understanding how policies, social structures, and economic factors impact people’s

health, how they seek care, and their outcomes. He has a particular focus on opioid use disorder in adults and adolescents, with an aim to close treatment gaps and improve outcomes. Dr. Buresh has a special interest in emergency medicine education. He strives to teach the next generation of emergency medicine doctors how to provide exceptional clinical care. Additionally, he helps them examine the ways in which a patient’s social and economic realities that impact their health can be understood and addressed.

Olivia Hood, MPH, CHES

Ms. Hood is a public health expert at the University of Washington, specializing in harm reduction, health education, program implementation, evaluation, and community engagement. She is passionate about expanding access to

evidence-based interventions and empowering underserved communities through culturally responsive low-barrier programming that meets people where they are. Olivia combines her expertise in public health and health education to support initiatives addressing substance use, mental health, and health equity.

Lauren Whiteside, MD MS

Dr. Whiteside is an emergency medicine physician with interdisciplinary post-graduate and fellowship training and a long-term commitment to caring for and improving the outcomes of patients with substance use disorders and substance use

problems. She cares for patients in the Emergency Department (ED) at Harborview Medical Center. Patients with substance use disorders often have co-occurring mental health and medical comorbidities, and the ED is a critical healthcare location for treatment and linkage to services. She has led efforts to improve the care of patients with substance use disorders in the ED, including development of their take-home naloxone program

and ED-initiated buprenorphine pathway and works with interdisciplinary partners on initiatives related to screening, brief intervention and transitions of care for this vulnerable population. She has partnered with Seattle King County Public

Health (SKCPH) to improve the care of patients with opioid use disorder from the ED across King County. Dr. Whiteside has funding from the National Institutes of Health, Patient Centered

Outcomes Research Institute and the Substance Abuse & Mental Health Services Administration.