Connections walk-in center reports rising use, highlights barriers to diverting patients from ERs

Connections Behavioral Health Crisis Walk-in Center staff told Cumberland County commissioners at their Sept. 24 finance meeting that the center has served more than 1,300 Cumberland County residents since opening, but said hospital referral patterns, emergency medical services payment rules and gaps in county dispatching limit use of the center instead of emergency departments.

The update, delivered by Britney McCarthy, strategic account manager for Connections, and Kimberly Jones, vice president of clinical operations, summarized service lines, response times, staffing and a plan to increase youth outreach. "We are now up to more than 1,300 individuals that have been served in Cumberland County," McCarthy said, citing data through Aug. 31.

The presentation laid out the center's services and performance: mobile crisis response for the three-county region (Cumberland, Dauphin and Perry), a walk-in urgent care option, and a 23-hour observation unit for crisis stabilization. McCarthy reported an average mobile response time specific to Cumberland County of 19 minutes and said the center records an average of under five minutes for law-enforcement backdoor drop-offs. Door-to-dock times were reported at 38 minutes for youth urgent care and 44 minutes for adult urgent care; the observation-unit average length of stay was 15 hours.

Why it matters: Connections aims to provide rapid behavioral-health care outside hospital emergency departments,…