Project Description Narrative:
Ashland and Bayfield Counties, like many rural and tribal communities around Wisconsin, face significant barriers in providing mental health crisis response. Crisis response is often traumatic for individuals and costly for county service agencies. Services for mental health treatments are limited and require travel up to five hours away by law enforcement and families.
CA:tCH (Chequamegon Accountable: the Community for Health), a community coalition serving Ashland and Bayfield Counties and Red Cliff and Bad River Tribes, is made up of public health and safety agencies, schools, health care providers, and people with experience working to improve behavioral health outcomes. The CA:tCH Plan Project creates a way for coalition members to legally and ethically coordinate crisis care with a participant-centered approach, reducing costly and traumatic emergency detentions by infusing crisis response with resources, strategies, and support people chosen by the participant. To improve and expand collaboration, improved technical solutions for HIPAA (Health Information Portability and Accountability Act) compliant, real-time, and user-friendly data collection and sharing are needed.
This project aims to improve and expand the existing CA:tCH portal for increased use in community crisis care coordination, while also developing a model for an improved data-sharing portal for new projects and other communities that leads to improved coordination between community partners supporting individuals in crisis.