Margie Balfour, M.D., Ph.D.

Expertise: Crisis systems

Dr. Margie Balfour is a psychiatrist and national leader in crisis care, quality improvement, and law enforcement responses to behavioral health emergencies. She is Chief of Quality and Clinical Innovation at Connections Health Solutions and an Associate Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Arizona. Dr. Balfour was named Doctor of the Year by the National Council for Mental Wellbeing for her leadership at the Crisis Response Center in Tucson, Ariz., and received the Sam Cochran Criminal Justice award from the National Alliance on Mental Illness for her work to help law enforcement better serve people with behavioral health needs. She co-authored Roadmap to the Ideal Crisis System: Essential Elements, Measurable Standards and Best Practices, and her pioneering work on crisis outcome measurement has been adopted as a national standard. Dr. Balfour is a Distinguished Fellow of the American Psychiatric Association and serves on its Council on Quality of Care. She has also served on the boards of the American Association for Community Psychiatry, American Association for Emergency Psychiatry, and numerous expert panels for the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA), the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) and others. A native of Monroe, La., Dr. Balfour received a BA in Biology at Johns Hopkins University and her MD and a Ph.D. in Neuroscience from the University of Cincinnati. She completed residency and fellowship in Community Psychiatry at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas.