Spokane County reports Q4 2024 crisis-line and high-utilizer counts; dashboard redesign planned

Katie Rice presented Spokane County’s October–December 2024 behavioral-health dashboard to the advisory board, reporting 56 high utilizers and 7,003 regional crisis hotline calls for the quarter and noting overall service totals are in line with prior quarters.

Rice said the county will publish links comparing the current quarter with the same period a year earlier and that both the high-utilizer count and regional crisis-line calls have declined year over year, in part because some calls are shifting to the national 988 number. ‘‘These two data points…I’m actually gonna include both a link to this current dashboard as well as the same time frame from a year ago in which you can see that both the number of high utilizers and regional crisis hotline calls have decreased significantly,’’ she said.

Rice also described improvements in average answer time for the regional crisis line and said mobile rapid-response encounters and investigation outcomes showed no significant year-over-year change. She acknowledged user requests from board members for more meaningful trend displays and said the county is considering a redesign of the dashboard to show wave-over-wave comparisons and additional breakouts.

A board member asked whether the dashboard can separate detentions initiated for mental-health reasons from detentions for substance use. Rice said the county does collect a distinction for involuntary-treatment-authority (ITA) cases that resulted in detention for substance use, and she said the county can provide that breakout in future reporting. She added a caution: the existing data do not capture every co-occurring condition or every outreach/engagement contact, and that in some cases regional referral patterns complicate the picture.

Rice closed by inviting feedback as the team plans dashboard improvements.