Telepsychiatry Uses within Law Enforcement/Corrections:
- Shared Service to Evaluate Arrested Individuals
- Crisis Intervention within a Correctional Facility
- Ongoing Medication Management
- Prisoner Reintegration Support Programs
Benefits
- Reduced Wait Times for Police Officers
- Decreased Overtime Premiums
- Decreased Hospital Costs
- More Time for Policing
- Crisis Evaluation and Intervention within 1 Hour
- Decreased Formulary Cost
- Disincentives to Recidivism
InSight Provides Cost Saving Shared Services Model & Keeps our Communities Safe:
Telepsychiatry services are provided to local police departments in NJ to expedite
the behavioral health evaluation of an arrested individual and keep our officers
out of hospital emergency waiting rooms and back on the streets, where we need them
most.
In response to the economic crisis and New Jersey’s Governor Corzine’s request for
innovative solutions to lower the burden on the state system in 2008, InSight reached
out to local police departments and developed a pilot Telepsychiatry program for
New Jersey counties. This program offered a new method for reducing costs to municipal
police departments via a shared service agreement that utilizes telepsychiatry to
expedite the admission of an arrestee into a county jail. This program was intended
to offer taxpayers considerable savings by reducing existing police expenditure
on unnecessary over time and hospitalization costs when handling arrestees with
behavioral health issues. Under this program, InSight conducts telepsychiatric evaluations
utilizing videoconferencing equipment already in place at the county jail for its
“video court” system. Arrested individuals are evaluated by a psychiatric clinician
within minutes of being transported to the county jail so that their mental health
can be assessed and appropriately addressed. This application greatly reduces the
potential for an arrested individual to hoax an illness in order to delay admittance
to jail and alleviates the burden of transportation as well as long waits within
an emergency room.
Prior to this telepsychiatry service, officers experienced problems when the arrested
individual made threats of suicide, thereby necessitating a psychiatric evaluation
before being transported to the county lock-up. The arresting officers were being
forced to transport the arrestee to a hospital’s emergency department for a psychiatric
evaluation before the arrestee could be admitted to the jail. Two officers would
then be forced to accompany the individual within the hospital until he or she could
be psychiatrically cleared, and this translated into excessive wait times of many
hours or even days during which the police departments were forced to pay high overtime
rates. Since its inception, this program has been termed as a win, win, win situation
that expedites the appropriate treatment of an arrested individual, enables local
police departments to save money and keep officers on the streets, and ultimately
saves New Jersey tax payers money.
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