Improving Mental Health Treatment for Individuals in Crisis Interacting with the Criminal Justice System

Summary

The proposed Center will leverage burgeoning real-time data linkage capabilities among health systems, Medicaid payors, and criminal legal (e.g., jail booking data, jail release data) systems, to identify individuals coming in and out of jail for suicide assessment and prevention, and to better coordinate care across these disparate systems. This Center will advance the fields of suicide prevention and criminal legal system-based mental health by solving a well-known, central problem in both fields: the inability to track and intervene with individuals moving in and out of both and often multiple systems. The goal is near-term reductions in the U.S. suicide rate.

Eligibility

Age range

18–100 years

Sex

All

Healthy volunteers

No

Interventions

• Other
  Treatment as usual (TAU)

  TAU patients will be identified using "targeted limited chart review methods" used in our prior studies, "scraping" clinical notes in the EHR for criminal justice involvement. Initial Identification terms, "police", "arrest", "court", "summons", "jail", and "crime" will be used to identify candidates for police involvement, downloading the sentence in which the keyword appeared and the sentence before and after. Next, an iterative process of editing of the search terms will be conducted to remove patients with negation of the keyword ("did not commit a crime"), and other sentence characteristics that generate false positives ("cardiac arrest"). Samples of the resulting dataset will be taken, accuracy assessed by examining the surrounding sentences, leading to further iterations and repetition of the process until a high level of accuracy is achieved.

• Other
  Family and Social Justice

  Documentation and follow-up by the Cambridge Police Department (CPD) for all mental health-related police calls, including involuntary and voluntary Emergency Department admissions; Established partnerships with city departments, healthcare systems, clergy, courts, businesses, and mental health advocates to ensure timely engagement in mental health treatment and community-based services; Required 40 hours of officer crisis intervention training (CIT), and additional sessions on trauma- informed policing, mental health, procedural justice, race, and crisis negotiation; and Staffing of sworn and civilian staff including specially-trained officers designated to work with individuals living with mental illness, homelessness, and substance abuse.

• Other
  Family and Social Justice Service and Navigator (FSJS+Navigator) Intervention

  The FSJS+Navigator intervention adds an Emergency Department (ED)-based Systems Navigator, a community health worker with lived experience (as family member or patient) with criminal justice and mental health systems, to the FSJS. This navigator will enhance communication between Cambridge Police Department (CPD), Cambridge Health Alliance (CHA), and community agencies by being the needed "point person" within the healthcare system (the FSJS intervention only has a CPD-based social worker) to maintain communication to improve mental health services and prevent deeper justice involvement. The Navigator engages with the FSJS process in step i) of the above sequence, engaging the patient in the CHA ED and obtaining consent. The Navigator then discusses the case with the presenting CPD officer, and relays critical information about the context of the service call to ED staff. Next, the Navigator will administer the baseline CAT-MH/SS and assess additional needs (employment, housing, food).

Location