About Margie Balfour

Dr. Margie Balfour is a psychiatrist and national leader in quality improvement, behavioral health crisis care, and law enforcement responses to mental illness. She is the Chief of Quality and Clinical Innovation at Connections Health Solutions, which provides immediate 24/7 access to mental health and substance use care throughout Arizona, and an Associate Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Arizona. Dr. Balfour was named the Doctor of the Year by the National Council for Behavioral Health for her work at the Crisis Response Center in Tucson and received the Tucson Police Department’s medal of honor for her efforts to help law enforcement better serve the mentally ill population. She has contributed to numerous expert panels for SAMHSA, the DOJ, and others. Her pioneering work on defining crisis metrics has been adopted as a national standard by SAMHSA, and she co-authored Roadmap to the Ideal Crisis System: Essential Elements, Measurable Standards, and Best Practices. Dr. Balfour is a Distinguished Fellow of the American Psychiatric Association and serves on the Council on Quality of Care. She has also served on the board of directors of the American Association of Community Psychiatrists, The American Association for Emergency Psychiatry, and NAMI Southern Arizona. A native of Monroe, Louisiana, Dr. Balfour received a BA in Biology at Johns Hopkins University and then her MD and PhD 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.