Penn Medicine is opening a mental health crisis response center at the former Mercy hospital

Penn Medicine is opening a mental health crisis response center at the former Mercy Philadelphia Hospital at South 54th Street and Cedar Avenue in West Philadelphia, replacing one that closed there in March 2020, the health system announced Friday.

That closure left a vast area of the city without easy access to a psychiatric emergency room. The closest adult crisis response center currently sits in Center City at Penn’s Pennsylvania Hospital. The city’s three other such centers are at Friends Hospital, Temple Episcopal, and Einstein Medical Center Philadelphia.

The new crisis response center is a key step in Penn’s realignment of behavioral health and addiction treatment at its Philadelphia hospitals and aims to make it easier for patients to access care without a hospital stay. Penn is reopening the center at a time of soaring demand for psychiatric services coming out of the pandemic, especially among young adults.

Under the realignment, Penn will have two sites, Pennsylvania Hospital and the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania — Cedar Avenue, at the former Mercy hospital site, offering emergency mental health services, as well as inpatient and outpatient behavioral health services. Penn opened 31 psychiatric and 16 detox beds at HUP Cedar two years ago, but those beds have only been about 50% occupied, Penn said.

“The overarching goal is to streamline our services and make the patient experience less challenging,” said Maria Oquendo, Penn’s psychiatrist-in-chief.

The plan also calls for the closure of psychiatric and addiction treatment beds at Penn Presbyterian Medical Center at the end of next month, reducing the overall number of beds Penn has in the city for such patients. Penn said it’s part of a shift toward outpatient care.

Penn expects to open the new crisis response center — for people with serious psychiatric conditions such as bipolar disorder, major depression, anxiety disorders, and schizophrenia — later in the summer. HUP Cedar is an outpost of Penn’s flagship hospital and part of the PHMC Public Health Campus, which opened in March 2021, after Trinity Health closed Mercy Philadelphia.

Penn is spending $5.76 million on the crisis response center at HUP Cedar, Penn said. Independence Blue Cross Foundation provided a $1.5 million grant for the project, and Philadelphia’s Department of Behavioral Health earmarked $4.1 million for it.

The two hubs create one-stop shops for patients. By having inpatient units in the same facility as the crisis response center, those who need to be admitted to the hospital won’t have to travel, Oquendo said. This eliminates the inconvenience and cost of an ambulance transfer, and quicker admissions will reduce wait time at the crisis response center, Oquendo said.

Penn said it expects the new crisis response center to serve 4,000 patients annually. ”The amount of demand that there is for mental health services is staggering,” Oquendo said.

Through this restructuring, the number of psychiatric beds Penn has in Philadelphia will fall to 73 from 95, and the number of addiction treatment beds will fall to 16 from 34, the health system said.

But that doesn’t mean Penn is reducing services, said Kevin B. Mahoney, CEO of the University of Pennsylvania Health System.

“We envision in the future far less inpatient rehab and much more outpatient rehab,” he said.

Mahoney said he expects the new crisis response center to lose about $4 million a year. He said that’s in part because many of the patients who use the services will have Medicaid insurance, which typically doesn’t cover the cost of care.

Penn offers a broad array of outpatient mental health and addiction services in a new Presbyterian facility at 4040 Market St., Oquendo said. The ability to provide intensive outpatient services at that former Elwyn Institute site has reduced the reliance on hospitalization, she said. It is also a critical resource for patients transitioning out of the hospital and into care in the community.

Patients in a mental health crisis can still access care at Penn’s other emergency departments in the city, at Presbyterian and the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania’s main campus on Spruce Street. Those sites will maintain psychiatric consult services, Oquendo said.