The Team
Laura Callan - Chief Medical Officer
Laura Callan is a board-certified Psychiatric Mental Health Nurse Practitioner whose clinical work is devoted entirely to older adults, the population she has chosen to serve and the one she knows most deeply.
She earned her Bachelor of Science in Nursing from the University of Colorado and her Master of Science in Nursing at Vanderbilt University, completing her PMHNP certification through one of the country's most respected advanced practice programs. Laura came to geriatric psychiatry through a career defined by underserved populations. Rural communities, corrections settings, and minority populations with limited access to care are the patients who shaped her clinical instincts before older adults became her singular focus.
Laura partners with assisted living, memory care, and long-term care communities throughout the Boulder and Denver metro area to provide psychiatric services directly to their residents. She integrates into each facility's care team, attends care planning meetings, communicates directly with nursing staff and families, and builds the kind of ongoing relationships with residents that allow her to notice change, respond early, and adjust treatment before situations escalate.
Laura remains actively engaged in the evolving science of geriatric psychiatry. She pursues ongoing education in areas including Alzheimer's disease, dementia care, and the broader cognitive and behavioral conditions that disproportionately affect older adults, staying current with emerging evidence to inform how she treats and how she thinks. While medication management is central to her practice, her orientation is always toward reducing unnecessary medication burden, minimizing polypharmacy, and arriving at the most effective and conservative treatment plan for each patient.
She is also a preceptor, actively training the next generation of psychiatric mental health nurse practitioners. That work reflects something Laura takes seriously: the field needs more providers who understand this population and are equipped to serve them well. She is invested in shaping that.
Laura built SparkWell around a belief that psychiatric care in these environments has to work for everyone inside them. When residents receive the kind of consistent, invested care Laura delivers, the effects reach further than the patient. Families have a clinician they can trust. Staff have a reliable clinical partner. And the community itself becomes a more stable, supported place to live and work. That is the model she is building, and the change she is here to make.
Patrick Callan - Chief Executive Officer
Patrick Callan is a healthcare operator and entrepreneur who has spent more than a decade building and supporting businesses inside the psychiatric services industry, developing a clear and practiced understanding of how to build the structure that allows for delivery of care that actually works.
He earned his Bachelor of Business Administration from Baylor University's Hankamer School of Business. In 2015 he founded Guideline Healthcare, a psychiatric-focused mental health staffing firm through which he spent over a decade working alongside psychiatric clinicians and building partnerships with more than 120 mental health facilities across the country, spanning community practices, independent providers, and the largest telehealth organizations in the nation. His subsequent role as Chief Business Officer at a psychiatric services company expanded that experience across both in-person and telehealth environments, giving him a comprehensive understanding of clinical operations, payer dynamics, and the full range of delivery models that define the industry today.
Throughout that career, Patrick's work has been defined by direct relationships with community administrators and organizational leadership. He does not operate from a distance. He is embedded in the partnerships SparkWell maintains, present in the conversations that matter, and personally invested in the consistency and continuity of every community the practice serves.
SparkWell was built deliberately around a unique clinical methodology and a genuine commitment to the communities it serves. Patrick's role is to ensure the operational infrastructure, the payer relationships, the community partnerships, and the business model itself all exist in service of that clinical mission rather than in tension with it. That is an uncommon thing to find in this industry, and building it correctly is what he is here to do.