Since 2021, we’ve been working with the San Diego Mobile Crisis Response Team program to support the scaling of their mental health crisis responders. In Spring 2024, a feature video was released by the BBC as part of the World Health Organization Foundation’s “Healthier Together” series, shining a spotlight on our partnership with PagerDuty to help launch and scale San Diego County’s Mental Health Crisis Response program. This innovative program ensures that people suffering mental health crises can access trained mental health professionals instead of relying on traditional 9-1-1 responders with limited mental health training.
The partnership with PagerDuty has been critical to the success of this program: While our Beacon Dispatch Platform is used to alert, coordinate and track the mental health crisis teams on the streets, we use PagerDuty to monitor all aspects of the Beacon platform’s codebase, ensuring our software is always up and running.
The mental health first responders | Healthier Together
Shortly after the BBC video was released, a new feature on the same program was published in the San Diego Union-Tribune, celebrating the third anniversary of this pioneering response system. In the article, it highlights the impact of the program: “Between July 2023 and January [2024], crisis teams responded to 3,365 calls countywide, a 43 percent increase from the previous six months and a 20 percent jump from all of 2022. … Less than 2 percent of calls from July to January were diverted to law enforcement.“
The San Diego program is managed by two organizations, Telecare Corp. and Exodus Recovery, both of whom are relying on our Beacon platform to manage nearly four dozen teams across the county.
Read the article here: https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/news/health/story/2024-04-20/mobile-crisis-response-teams
