A new partnership between the Hidalgo County Justice of the Peace and DHR Health was established in order to use a Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act [HIPAA] compliant platform to streamline mental health warrants.
According to Vice President of DHR Health Behavioral Hospital Vanessa Saenz as of April 3 the app currently being used by DHR Health is called Everbridge.
Saenz said the emergency mental health warrants are issued for people showing signs of mental illness and are at substantial risk of serious harm to themselves or others.
“A lot of times these individuals who are identified in a mental health crisis, they won’t consent for their own treatment or they don’t want to. And so in that case that’s where this process kicks in and it’s meant to help connect an individual to mental health resources when they’re not necessarily in a state of mind where they would seek out those services by themselves,” Saenz said.
She said the app has multiple other options that assist with health care.
“The program, we use it for a lot of things. We use it for on-call scheduling, we use it for mass internal messaging for our staff, but we can also use it for something like this [streamline mental health warrants],” Saenz said.
Justice of the Peace Precinct 4 Place 2 – Judge Andre Maldonado said he decided to go ahead and start using this app because of the amount of time it saves compared to the previous method of getting mental health warrants signed.
“Before, Justice’s of the Peace, we would have to either go in person to the hospital to sign these mental health warrants. Or they would have to be sent through fax so it could be HIPAA compliant,” Maldonado said.
He said time is of the essence when assisting someone who needs medical attention. Which is why he believes the app benefits all parties involved.
“With this app, it helps out not only the person who is having their mental issues, it helps out the hospital staff, it helps out the police who are there on standby waiting for the warrant to be signed. It gets them evaluated as soon as possible to get treatment for whatever mental health condition the person is exhibiting,” Maldonado said.
For more information about DHR Health you can visit their website at dhrhealth.com.
