The Montgomery County commission committed $1.3 million in opioid settlement dollars to the Safety Net Portal. On Tuesday, the commission provided their second and final allocation of $971,682 toward project completion.
GDAHA is actively pursuing additional funding to complete the final portion of the project. Area hospitals like Kettering Health and Premier Health gave $200,000 total to the project.
“Our county jail and emergency departments are often the de facto mental health treatment centers for people in mental health crisis,” said Commission President Judy Dodge. “This approach is expensive and inefficient. We need care coordination to get these citizens quickly into an appropriate care setting, and this Safety Net Portal will help us achieve that.”
Coordinators of the project also met with commissioners on Tuesday morning to update them on progress made, saying the final stages of the project will take roughly 15 months to complete.
Phase 1, a Crisis Notification System for Montgomery County Probate Court, became active in February. This phase creates real-time notifications when a person on the civil commitment docket is admitted to a local hospital due to a mental health crisis.
As of Monday, 16 notifications have been sent out through the system.
Since 2019, hospitals in Montgomery County have seen a 26% increase in patient encounters for behavioral health needs in area emergency departments, with an additional 8.6% increase in patient encounters for substance use disorder, according to a report published by the county’s Behavioral Health Task Force in 2023.
Nearly 20% of patients who receive care at an emergency department for behavioral health needs or substance use disorder are treated two or more times, according to the 2023 report.
Those with mental health issues are overrepresented in the criminal justice system. For inmates with underlying mental health issues, county jails have often become the de facto treatment center, and limited physical and behavioral health resources have complicated people’s recovery and ability to be successful after their release, the task force found.
“Feedback from our hospitals and behavioral health partners across the continuum has been instrumental in determining what features our Safety Net Portal must have and how it needs to function to improve patient care,” said Sarah Hackenbracht, president and CEO of GDAHA.
Phase 2 has also been completed. This part of the project involved data exploration and legal support services to design a prototype — which is in compliance with health privacy laws — to gather feedback on how the full system should work.
Task force partners worked for six months with contractor Ascend Innovations to define the data-sharing approach and legal requirements for the prototype rollout, county leaders said Tuesday.
“The Safety Net Portal is about connection—connecting data, organizations and people to co-create better outcomes for those in crisis,” said Josh Gratsch, president and CEO of Ascend Innovations. “By leveraging technology, we can build a system that is more responsive, coordinated and effective.”
User feedback sessions will be held with stakeholders, including clinicians and the Montgomery County Behavioral Health Task Force, to see if the system meets user needs.
Up to 14 small group work sessions with frontline workers and county-level decision makers will be planned to gather more feedback, according to a Montgomery County press release.
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