Eight months into its launch, the Grand Traverse Mental Health Crisis and Access Center – a partnership between Munson Healthcare and Northern Lakes Community Mental Health Authority (NLCMHA) – is seeing an increasing volume of patients for its initial services, including 24/7 care and northern Michigan’s first psychiatric urgent care. The center is now preparing for its next major expansion: bringing nine adult and six pediatric crisis residential beds online.

Munson COO Laura Glenn provided a recent update to Grand Traverse County commissioners on the center’s progress since opening in January at 410 Brook Street on the Munson Medical Center campus in Traverse City. The county is a significant funding partner for the project, committing $5 million in American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) funds to the center. Just under $4 million of that funding has been spent to date, Glenn said.

In phase one, which ran from January to June, the center offered services including crisis phone screening, mobile crisis services, face-to-face crisis intervention, psychiatric preadmission screening, peer support services, and referrals to outpatient therapy. The facility operated Sunday-Thursday 8am-8pm. During those six months, there were 277 service contacts with individuals from 20 counties – with the majority from Grand Traverse County, Glenn said.

On July 7, the center launched phase two of services and expanded hours to 24/7. New offerings now available include a “living room” model of care facilitated by NLCMHA, which offers a “safe, home-like, non-clinical setting where people can receive crisis intervention, stabilization services, and support from staff who have their own experience with mental illness or substance use disorder,” according to Munson’s website.

The facility also launched a new psychiatric urgent care, which is the only such urgent care north of Grand Rapids and one of only a handful in Michigan, Glenn said. The urgent care is operated by Munson Monday-Friday 8am-5pm and has a full-time psychiatrist on staff. Psychiatric urgent care is “an intermediate level of care between community-based services and hospital care services that can often prevent urgent situations from escalating,” the website notes.

In the first month of phase two, there have been 58 urgent care visits and 108 crisis center contacts, according to Glenn. “Our volume is increasing,” she said. “We are serving more individuals in that location.” She reminded commissioners that the goal of the center is to provide a complete “crisis continuum” – with the facility being the missing piece locally until its opening – and to divert individuals experiencing mental health crises from the emergency room or jail. Glenn said the center has been able to successfully resolve most of the crises it’s handled, connecting individuals with continued support services in the community after leaving the facility. Only 10 visits have resulted in in-patient admissions, she said.

The center is now working on its next major expansion, or its final third and fourth phases. Those will include bringing nine adult crisis residential beds online first – to be operated by NLCMHA – followed by six pediatric crisis residential beds operated by Munson. The adult beds are already built out and are now in the licensing process, Glenn said. Co-locating multiple services under one roof has made the licensing process more complicated, she noted, though “it’s the right thing for sustainability long term.” Phase four just cleared a “major hurdle” in the last month in receiving preliminary licensing approval for the pediatric beds. The design for the pediatric portion of the building is completed and the project bid out, with construction anticipated to start this fall, Glenn said.

“I’m really encouraged by the progress,” she said. Glenn noted that no other such pediatric beds are available in northern Michigan, with Traverse City serving as the region’s first such facility. Crisis residential beds are “just one step below the level of care” that’s provided at Munson’s in-patient unit, which has 17 beds, Glenn said.

According to Glenn, the center’s goal is to ramp up patient volumes over the next few years. She estimated at a “fully mature” state that the psychiatric urgent care would average 10 patients a day, for instance. Approximately 40 percent of facility patients right now are covered by Medicaid, she said, with the rest under Medicare or private insurance. In response to commission questions, Glenn acknowledged that Medicaid percentage could potentially shift under federal work requirements coming in the future. The number one question facing the center – and its pro forma – is how many patients will come through its doors in the coming years, which for now is based only on projections, Glenn said.

“What we're doing is really unique,” she said. “The biggest unknown right now is truly what those patient volumes are going to look like.” Commissioners also asked about the partnership with NLCMHA and why that organization’s representatives hadn’t been included as part of the presentation group at the meeting. Glenn noted that NLCMHA is going through a leadership transition and that the updates she was giving at the meeting were primarily focused on services for which Munson is the provider and fiduciary. County Administrator Nate Alger assured commissioners that NLCMHA Interim CEO Dr. Curtis Cummins is part of the center’s leadership team and has been “very actively involved” with the facility. Glenn also said Munson and NLCMHA are collaborating frequently to ensure the viability of the center, since the ARPA agreement entails a minimum 10-year commitment to provide services at that location.

“We have a very vested interest and commitment...in making sure these services are sustainable long term for the community,” she said.