CESSA Subcommittee for Technology, Systems Integration & Data Management (TSIDM)
February 03, 2025, 2:00 - 3:30 pm via Zoom
Approved by members on April 07, 2025
Subcommittee members: Brent Reynolds, Cindy Barbera-Brelle, David Albert (Designee- Lucy Craycroft), Jim Kaitschuk, Robert Van Bebber, Candace Coleman (Designee-Jessica Gimeno)
- Welcome and Call to Order (Roll Call)
- Open Meetings Act
- Approval of the Minutes from January 6, 2026
- State Updates
- The Behavioral Health Crisis Hub Updates
- 988 Data Updates
- Pilot Updates
- Baseline Data and Assessment Project Plan Discussion
- Next Meeting Dates
- Public Comment
- Adjournment
The meeting was called to order by Pete Eckart at approximately 2:02 p.m.
Roll call and attempted approval of minutes:
- Absent: Cindy Barbera-Brelle, Brent Reynolds, Robert Van Bebber
- Present: Jessica Gimeno, Jim Kaitschuk, Lucy Craycroft
- No quorum present; accordingly January 6, 2025 meeting minutes could not be approved
State/DMH Updates
- Introducing Lucy Craycroft, designee for Director David Albert
Hub Updates
- Erin Condon to take over as administrative lead for the TSIDM Subcommittee
988 Updates (Craig Williams)
- Public-facing dashboard by DMH/DHS is in progress
- Members should reach out to Craig about any metrics they would like to see
- January 2025: 91% answer rate through January 29, 2025 (and the remaining 9% go to a national backup center)
- On track to be above 90% for the last four months; eventually moving towards 95% rate
- Craig responded to Brent Reynolds's concern about how individual calls may disconnect and the 988 call centers do not call back
- Distinguishing between crisis and emergency; crises are subject to certain privacy and confidentiality concerns
- AT&T is joining geo-routing (beginning Sep. 2024)
- Geo-routing and geolocation are different (geo-routing does not identify the exact location, but rather the general area)
- Prior to September 17, Vibrant assigned calls based on the area code and 10-digit number; this was an issue because people can move out of state without changing their number
- Assessing how this change will impact overall call volume; early evidence suggests an increase (~11%)
Pilot Updates
- Pilots began on January 29, 2025
- As of today, 4 911 call centers are participating in the pilot; others will likely come online this week or next week
- Meetings with pilot participants to touch base and answer questions about the pilots
Baseline Data and Assessment
- In the CESSA implementation process, we have arrived at system change and we need to measure our performance before and after changes
- Such an assessment can either a) compare our system to national standards or b) repeat across time to measure our own progress
- Late June 2025: draft and delivery of Baseline Assessment Results report
- Summary of Project Plan and Timeline
- Identify outcomes, measures, and benchmarks for assessment
- Confirm timeframe for baseline period
- Identify data sources for measures
- Create dataset for baseline assessment
- Collect data and populate dataset
- Determine method and audience for distributing results
- Draft and deliver Baseline Assessment Results report
- Determine comparisons for next studies
- Review results and confirm outcomes/measures for comparison studies
- Complete first comparison study
Step 1: Identify Outcomes and Measures
- Discussion about indicators previously identified/approved by FY 23 and FY 24 Subcommittee cohorts
Step 2: Confirm Timeframe for Baseline
Step 3: Identify Data Sources for Measures
- Discussion about potential data sources
- Pete Eckart: Nationally there continues to be concern about how to get the right support and response for people in mental health crisis from the entire crisis response system...Does anybody know of any data/resource that would speak to this question: What amount/percentage/degree of mental health crisis calls were sent to traditional 1st responders that might have been better addressed by somebody else?
- Jim Kaitschuk: Did you mean annual data?
- Pete: Yes, Jim, annual data. It seems unlikely that we get anything more granular than that, right?
- Jim: Well, and we're probably lucky if we get data that does that...From my personal experience, it's mostly anecdotal more so than anything else...I would say that there probably are a number of situations that probably could have been handled by a 590 provider and different circumstances. Unfortunately, too, I think the other thing we got to think about with this is, there is a lot of back and forth, so it might very well go to law enforcement, then go to a 590, and then back to law enforcement. That is something I'm seeing an increased volume of more and more. One of the challenges in terms of information is, we may not know (or from a law enforcement perspective, unlikely know) what has occurred, and that's one of the gaps that exists at the moment. There's not a full blown knowledge base of continuum of care, and I don't know how to get at that...I can give you an example of a situation where 2 people got killed over the weekend and had been involved with mobile crisis here and in Central Illinois, Menard County in particular, which is the area that I patrol, and obviously a situation that did not end well. Law enforcement was there after the scene had already occurred. We had been previously involved, and referred to 590 provider, but ultimately couldn't do enough to stop what happened.
- Pete: The issue of the full continuum of care is something Mary Smith talks about a lot. And you're absolutely right, we don't currently have a way to track people as they move through the different systems. So I appreciate that sobering example - thanks.
- Lorrie: I would ask Jim a question about that incident. For similar-type calls, if a call comes through [to law enforcement] and you involve mobile crisis response on the scene, but the telecommunicators don't dispatch to 988, then this would be coded as a law enforcement incident. Like trespassing, or criminal damage to property, or whatever.
- Jim: Not necessarily. I mean, it depends. If there was not a criminal offense we might very well go ahead and recode that as being mental health.
- Lorrie: When do you recode that?
- Jim: Right as we're on scene. Quite honestly, it doesn't happen all the time, but it does happen sometimes. You may have calls that are mixed where it could be a prowler report and find out that that person really needed some mental health issues addressed. But, with something where I'm still out there, for example, and I hand them my phone where I've got mobile crisis- they're not able to come on scene - but maybe I've got them on the phone, then I'm probably gonna recode that, if there was no criminal activity, if it was just a matter of somebody needing some help.
- Lorrie: But if it were criminal activity - like criminal damage to property - and it was a person with mental illness, you've got a crime being committed, and it's being committed by a person with mental illness. Would that be coded that way from the outset?
- Jim: If it was criminal damage to property, for example, and I find that there is criminal damage to property, then I'm going to keep it as criminal damage to property. I'm not going to recode it at that point in time, because you have a criminal activity occur
- Lorrie: And we would never know that a person with mental illness was involved?
- Jim: Well, you would never know, at least by the designation that we would enter into the codes, but you would if you had access to full view, the disposition....
- Lorrie: Yes, yes.
- Pete: [Before moving on], I want to make sure we didn't have anyone else who wanted to respond to that question.
- Matt Fishback: I know for our office, it gets complicated because we have the behavioral health co-response program that does work in our 911 center, for our sheriff's police, and then 35 other police departments in Cook County. So, they'll take calls that would presumably be something like this pilot. So, they're taking the calls that would have been transferred to 988 by behavioral health people in our 911 center. So ,there's a few thousand of those calls a year, but it's also spanning a large population. It's like a proactive way of addressing those types of calls. On the other side, like Jim was saying, it's hard to say when you get the call if it's a behavioral health call based on whatever limited information you have, and as the situation progresses in the end you could have a spot on the police report that says mental health related. It doesn't really change how the call or the activity was coded necessarily. So now you're getting into a lot of minutia and individual reports, and in aggregate, that's a lot of information. It's hard to say. This has been the case with putting this together since the beginning...How do you take a spectrum of calls with a behavioral health element, but you don't have enough information? How can you tell as a telecommunicator that this is definitely a behavioral health call? How do you take that 45 seconds of conversation and decide an ideal response? Sure, there is probably twice as many calls that are being redirected from our 911 to our behavioral health people that should have gone there. But you can't tell as a telecommunicator that that is definitely that type of call until after the fact. There's just so many different types of data, like 911 centers collecting immense amounts of data, but might be particular to the 911 center. And then our police are also collecting different data in their reports and everything else. So how those work together, Peter and I have had this conversation a number of times over the years. This is a lot of data. But how do you pinpoint it? How do you make it the same across all the different organizations?
- Pete: We don't want to let the fact that some parts of the system have a more extensive or advanced approach to data than others prevent us from gathering that information. Something Jodie and I have talked about is the importance of knowing what's happening where. Not because everybody is going to be as sophisticated as you know, the city of Chicago or Cook County or Springfield or U of I...I don't really know how the resources are distributed across the state. I think some places have more sophisticated data because someone in the political infrastructure said "We really need this data." It will be an opportunity during this assessment to try to document as comprehensively as possible what kinds of data are going to be collected, not because everybody needs to reach the same ceiling, but I think we'd like to establish some kind of meaningful work.
- Matt: I agree, but when I think about it, it was like, who's getting data? Where's the data being sent? Who is distributing the data? If it's not uniform in some sense, the analysis becomes very difficult.
- Jodie to follow up with Matt about existing data that is available
- Jessica Gimeno: I believe Jim had mentioned something earlier about how lately the calls have been going back and forth between the different stakeholders. Is that a trend? What does he think is the reason for that?
- Jim: Well, I didn't mean to imply we're getting a call that is getting bounced from one to the next. I guess what I'm saying is, for example, we may send something to the local 590, the 590 does comes out on scene, checks it out or talks to the individual, and then they refer it back to us because, as an example, they believe that person should be involuntary committed, and they don't want to involuntary commit, and they want to put that back to law enforcement for us to do that. That's one example. Another example would be that maybe the mobile crisis has done what they do, but it wasn't enough to remedy/alleviate the situation, so we're back again. Because the situation wasn't resolved to the point where that person is now getting the help and treatment that they need.
- Kaprinta Marek: Jim, are you with the Will County Sherrif?
- Jim: No, I'm with the Illinois Sherrif's Association, but I also work as a deputy.
Step 4: Create System to House Dataset (internal to BHCH)
Step 5: Collect Data/Populate Dataset
Step 6: Determine Report Format & Audiences
- Jodie Bargeron: What formats would be most useful to use? Dashboards, presentations, or something else?
- Jessica Gimeno: Personally, presentations and dashboards. A visual representation of the data, especially if we're looking at multiple points in time, or if you're comparing it to another area nationally.
- Folks should reach out to Jodie Bargeron with further comments/suggestions
Step 7: Draft Report
Next scheduled meetings
- Monday, March 3 at 2 pm
- Monday, April 7 at 2 pm
Public Comment and Adjournment
