In 2019, a social worker at Kansas City, Mo.-based Children’s Mercy came off a 14-hour shift and left behind a note at 3 a.m.: “Five kids with nowhere to go because of mental health needs. Can Children’s Mercy do something?”
It pointed to a gap in the care continuum: children well enough to leave the emergency department, but with nowhere nearby to get the ongoing care they needed. It also captured a familiar helplessness — families and care teams standing in an ED with a child in crisis and no clear next move.
The system’s answer was to stop treating the ED as the last stop on that journey.
That question didn’t stay on a sticky note for long. By 2023, it had become Illuminate, a five-year, $150 million commitment built around 14 projects and four strategies: earlier intervention, expanded specialty access, research and innovation, and better care both inside the hospital and after discharge. The campaign hit its goal more than two years ahead of schedule, crossing $150 million in March 2026 with the support of more than 5,000 donors.
Getting there took more than a five-year plan on paper. “We decided as an enterprise and an institution that behavioral health was pediatric health, and while it did not necessarily have the same ROI or make money as other areas did, it was our responsibility to help fix it in the community,” said Stephanie Meyer, chief nurse executive and COO of acute care at Children’s Mercy.
Closing that gap took years of fundraising, philanthropic gifts, government-relations work that secured state funding, and layered matching support.
That philosophy took physical shape in the Emergency Mental Health Crisis Center. Ms. Meyer described what it changed: “It’s provided an environment for them that is quieter, that’s more focused on mental health, and that really can make sure that we are streamlining the care that gets to them,” she said. “It’s a dedicated treatment area, and it eliminates the need to occupy other emergency department space that we need for true trauma care.”
The payoff shows up directly in capacity: The center has added an average of 78 additional ED bed-hours per day. But none of that solves what happens once a child walks back out the door. That is where the Path Clinic — pediatric access to therapeutic healing — picks up.
As Ms. Meyer said, “The crisis doesn’t end just when we’ve stabilized them inside the doors — the real work starts often after they’ve left, with the support and continuing care they need. What the Path Clinic has allowed us to do is connect those families to services they need, specific for each child, quickly.” Path schedules most patients within three days of leaving the crisis center and stays involved for six to eight weeks, connecting families to community resources and long-term medical follow-up.
Standing up both programs meant redeploying people, not just adding them. Staff already drawn to behavioral health work — in the ED, in developmental and behavioral health clinics — moved into the new center and clinic, supplemented by newly hired advanced practice providers, physicians, nurses, social workers and case managers.
The staffing and space investment shows up in the numbers Children’s Mercy tracks most closely. Staff injuries have dropped more than 58% since the crisis center opened, a shift Ms. Meyer attributes to giving staff both the right training — all crisis-center staff complete Marcus Crisis Prevention training — and an environment suited to de-escalation rather than containment.
Physical restraint use fell from 43 instances in a five-month stretch — from July to November 2025 — to 21 in the following comparable period — December 2025 to July 2026. Left-before-seen rates in the ED have stayed in the single digits most months since the center opened, because behavioral health patients are no longer competing for the same beds as acute trauma cases.
Ms. Meyers stressed that the gains in safety and ED throughput are not attributable to a single project, but to the broader behavioral health investment, including redesigned space, crisis training, and the dedicated crisis center.
On the outpatient side, of 6,107 follow-up calls made to Path-referred families, 91% resulted in a successfully scheduled appointment and 99% of patients completed their full treatment course. Perhaps the clearest signal that the model works: 97% of Path patients never return to the crisis center while they’re under its care.
For hospitals without $150 million to spend, Ms. Meyer’s advice starts smaller than a new building. Pair a reworked footprint with crisis-prevention training for staff, and benefits are reachable without a major capital campaign attached to it.
“If your resources are limited, the first thing I’d tell you is to really look at the layout of the space, and see if there’s any way to have a space that promotes mental and behavioral health differently than the emergency department,” she said. “Even before we had this crisis center, we were looking at whether we could have three or four bays within the emergency department that we use for nothing but that. Is there a way to try to change our flow and our throughput to accommodate better healing?”
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