Read this article about RI International, one of our finalists, in the category Best Achievement of Operational Excellence in Healthcare, selected by the independent judging panel, for the 2019 Business Transformation & Operational Excellence Industry Awards program. Click here to read articles on other finalists.

Business Case

We have arrived at a time of great opportunity. A perfect storm in which psychiatric boarding challenges, escalating healthcare costs, public safety concerns around mental health and higher rates of incarceration for individuals experiencing mental health issues have solidified a desire to change how we address acute mental health needs within our communities. We have an opportunity to truly deliver on the commitment to better health outcomes, improved experience for those with acute mental health needs and dramatically lower healthcare costs through the implementation of a recently established set of crisis care service delivery standards.

The National Action Alliance for Suicide Prevention’s Crisis Now: Transforming Services is Within Our Reach report and the corresponding business case resources offer a quantifiable, cost- reducing roadmap to replicate systems that are being implemented, in varying degrees, across the United States. The approaches and the levels of care advanced within the Crisis Now model already exist in a vast majority of our communities as physical health and first responder system counterparts; so significant aspects of this design are in many ways familiar to healthcare leaders and community stakeholders.

Additionally, tools are now available to calculate the very real impact of developing a comprehensive mental health crisis response system. This data-driven approach that corresponds with the Crisis Now Business Case can be applied to any population through the use of tools on the National Association of State Mental Health Program Directors’ (NASMHPD’s) website www.crisisnow.com; supporting independent analysis of cost impact that follows design implementation.

The Crisis Now Difference

Crisis Now bypasses the hospital ED and targets 100% access for individuals in need. It paves the way to reducing incarceration of individuals with a mental illness and ending psychiatric boarding in emergency departments. By utilizing advanced innovative practices and tools to assess community need for those experiencing a mental health crisis, this model reduces the cost of care for individuals experiencing a mental health crisis by 50% while dramatically improving the healthcare experience and aligns service to the individual need.

Crisis Now is a replicable and sustainable model that not only advances exceptional practice standards, but also offers corresponding data and tools to (1) predict the number of mental health crisis episodes a community will experience, (2) estimate the number of beds and other crisis resources a community will require to optimally address the need, (3) project the cost of implementing services and (4) evaluate the impact on justice system demands.

The visual above represents the actual impact of advancing crisis services in Maricopa County Arizona.

Adoption of this model will improve the quality of the crisis system and care for those in crisis in areas that utilize it. The innovation is in the operationalization of practice and standards. The tools created support easy modeling of capacity and service requirements that actually decrease costs by providing the right care at the right time.

Business Case video: https://youtu.be/GWZKW8PLIgQ