For someone experiencing a mental health or substance abuse crisis, receiving timely access to care is critical. 

Recognizing a growing need for behavioral health intervention, San Diego County launched its Telecare Mobile Crisis Response Team (MCRT) to provide no-cost, in-person support. “With mental health crises on the rise, counties are trying to figure out how to implement something that supports folks in the community,” said Bre Lane, Program Administrator at MCRT. “When we started two and half years ago, we were serving on average 50 calls per month. Now we’re up to 500 and sometimes 600 calls.”

Mobilizing first responders is critical to ensuring people in crises receive access to the services they urgently need. When a call comes in, MCRT dispatchers must rapidly find the team closest to the crisis’s location and ensure they reach the destination safely. “Everything we do here is through technology,” Lane said. “And we rely on Beacon as our main point of contact between our dispatchers and our mobile response teams.”

Mobilizing first responders 

Beacon is a cloud-dispatch platform from Trek Medics, an impact customer and participant of the PagerDuty Impact Accelerator program. With the goal of transforming emergency response networks in global communities, the company relies on the PagerDuty Operations Cloud to ensure its internal response systems remain up and running, and its users maintain critical response services.

“When I created this technology, the heart of the effort was to help people in need,” said Jason Friesen, Founder and Executive Director of Trek Medics. “PagerDuty enables technologies like Beacon to alert, coordinate, and track responders, and ensure they can deliver lifesaving care.” 

Since becoming a PagerDuty partner in 2020, Trek Medics has used the platform as an internal response and early warning system for Beacon. “PagerDuty was a fantastic solution for us,” said Friesen., “It came in at the time when we were expanding in terms of both sophistication of the software platform and also the size of our engineering team.” 

Trek Medics supports organizations around the world that rely on its platform to run their operations. With users located in different time zones, it’s imperative that Beacon has minimal downtime and issues are resolved quickly. “Because PagerDuty is keeping an eye on all of our systems, our engineers have been able to focus on innovation and creating new features that our users need to allow them to respond to crises as quickly and efficiently as possible,” said Friesen.

Living #HealthierTogether

At PagerDuty.org, we are committed to serving our social impact customers, increasing support, and expanding critical services, like the ones offered by Trek Medics and MCRT. “PagerDuty backing Beacon has enabled us to help thousands of people in the community,” said Lane, “and without that support, we wouldn’t be able to do the critical work we’re doing.”

See how the PagerDuty provides Trek Medics and the MCRT the tools they need to provide lifesaving care.