Oklahoma City fire department outlines Mobile Integrated Health teams to divert mental-health and overdose 911 calls

At a meeting of the Community Public Safety Advisory Board, Lori Brown Loftus, program manager for the Mobile Integrated Health Care team in the Oklahoma City Fire Department, described a 27-person program that embeds mental-health clinicians and paramedics inside the city's 911 system to divert appropriate behavioral-health and overdose calls from traditional law-enforcement or ambulance responses.

"Our vision is a safe and thriving city in which every call for assistance leads to a service that best meets that person's unique needs," Loftus said, summarizing the program's goal to give callers alternatives to a standard police or EMS response.

The Mobile Integrated Health (MIH) program operates four teams, Loftus told the board: crisis call diversion (CCD), the crisis response team (CRT), an alternative response team (ART) and a community advocacy program (CAP). CCD staff are embedded in the 911 communication center to assess callers and either stabilize them by phone or dispatch the appropriate MIH team. CRT pairs a mental-health…