Body of Abstract: In 2023 North Carolina received historical funding from the State Legislature to transform its behavioral health system to better support the overall health and well-being of North Carolinians. More than $130 million of the $835 million investment in behavioral health was dedicated to improving Noth Carolina’s crisis response system. Since that investment the Division of Mental Health, Developmental Disabilities and Substance Use Services (DMHDDSUS) has worked to create a robust crisis to care system that can serve people close to home and in the least restrictive setting possible.
This abstract submission proposes a panel of experts from NC DMHDDSUS to discuss North Carolina’s approach to advance the State’s behavioral crisis response system. The session will focus on how North Carolina used a data-backed, community informed method to maximize their investments into their crisis model: Someone to Contact, Someone to Respond and a Safer Place for Help.
First, the panel will discuss how they used quantitative data, coupled with SAMSHA’s crisis now model, to understand the service needs throughout the State. This included using almost real time data to monitor total inpatient and community crisis facilities beds across the state, determining the rate of holds and median length of stay for behavioral health holds by county, and a variety of demographics including race and age to understand disparities. This data supported DHHS in identifying where people could be connected to care more efficiently, with a goal of reducing long stays in emergency departments.
Next, the team will cover their community engagement model that was leveraged to get qualitative feedback from providers, payers and other community-based organizations. This included a 185-member Crisis Advisory Committee model to get community comments on what the team was seeing in the data and benchmark it against anecdotal experiences in the field.
Third, the team will review the results of the data analysis and community feedback and how that led to investment decisions to fund Adult and Child Community Crisis Facilities, Behavioral Health Urgent Cares and Mobile Crisis/Law Enforcement Co-response. So far, investments have led to a 69% increase in Behavioral Health Urgent Care capacity as well as 32% increase in Community Crisis Facility capacity.
Finally, the panel will discuss preliminary outcomes related to these investments. This will include a review of utilization results across the crisis continuum as well as reduced adverse outcomes.
Learning Objectives:
Describe how to utilize quantitative and qualitative data to best identify community opportunity and need for crisis services.
Analyze ED data as well as other quantitative data and apply that to the crisis need.
Use the results of an analysis to maximize resources and dollars to improve availability of crisis services.
