Lorin Scher, MD

Lorin Scher is a professor and vice-chair in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences and the Roy T. Brophy endowed chair for education at the UC Davis School of Medicine. Dr. Scher specializes in integrated behavioral health models of care, neuropsychiatry, and hospital-based psychiatry. Dr. Scher serves as the director of emergency psychiatric services at UC Davis Medical Center, and he directs behavioral health integration services across the university’s ambulatory care network and affiliates. Dr. Scher also serves as the medical director for Government and Community Relations at UC Davis Health. He also serves as co-director of the Huntington’s Disease Center of Excellence at UC Davis.

Dr. Scher treats patients suffering from medical and surgical illnesses in a variety of inpatient and outpatient settings, and he believes in an empathic and compassionate approach to patient care. Since 2012, Dr. Scher has collaborated with the UC Davis ambulatory care leadership team to integrate behavioral health programs into primary care and specialty services. This team has implemented validated screening measures and a stepped-treatment model to improve patient outcomes. The stepped program includes electronic consultations, ambulatory case management services, the collaborative care model (CoCM) for common psychiatric conditions, telepsychiatry services, and embedded psychiatric consultants. Dr. Scher is the principal investigator for three studies related to mental health integration within primary care (funded by the California Healthcare Foundation, the Archstone Foundation, and the UC Davis Practice Management Board), and he serves as a co-PI or co-investigator on a number of research and implementation grants related to service integration and neuropsychiatry (funded by UCOP, AHRQ, CDC, CIRM). Dr. Scher has over 33 publications in peer-reviewed journals and academic textbooks.

He also supervises medical students, residents, fellows, and allied-health professionals in a variety of settings within UC Davis Health, including its consultation-liaison psychiatry service, emergency psychiatry service, primary care network, and within the Department of Care Services and Innovation. Dr. Scher oversees medical education efforts within the Department of Psychiatry. He also serves as chair of the curriculum enrichment committee within the school of medicine, which oversees the curriculum for post-clerkship and electives courses at UC Davis.

Dr. Scher completed his general psychiatry residency training at New York-Presbyterian Hospital (Cornell). He also completed a fellowship in consultation-liaison (C-L) psychiatry at UC Davis before joining its faculty. He is board-certified in general psychiatry and consultation-liaison psychiatry. He received an M.D. at George Washington University School of Medicine and earned his undergraduate degree in Economics at Columbia University.