September 25, 2025
Following are this week’s updates. If you have questions, please contact [email protected].
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July MSP – County Participation Needed for Testing New Charge Regeneration
CalMHSA is soliciting feedback on a new feature in the July MSP.
- What’s Changing: When a charge is regenerated, SmartCare will now retain the original charge ID instead of creating a new one. This update is designed to improve the accuracy of payment and denial postings.
- How You Can Help: We’re asking counties to test this new logic in the QA environment and provide feedback. Your participation is crucial to ensure smooth implementation and identify any billing implications.
The release notes for this feature are available on the website (search for feature 519458). Please begin testing and share your findings with [email protected] and [email protected] by Oct 3rd.
Role Access Update for CalMHSA Rx Transition Screen: Sept. 29
Beginning Sept. 29, the roles “Add Pharmacies to Rx” and “Add Medications Prescribed Elsewhere” will have access to only the Client Summary link on the CalMHSA Rx transition screen. All other roles that provide access to the CalMHSA Rx transition screen will continue to have access to all three links:
- Client Summary
- Pharmacy Messages
- Prescription Summary
This effort is being made to align system access with role-based responsibilities. It will limit access to those CalMHSA RX screens, and these roles will not be able to see other clients beyond the client selected in SmartCare. Please reach out to the appropriate support contacts with questions or if you require assistance.
Ethnicity/Race Global Code Clean-Up Update
CalMHSA’s teams — including our data team, epidemiologists, clinical team, state reporting team, and interoperability team — continue to work toward determining how best to ensure the race and ethnicity fields in the client information global codes are properly used.
This includes ensuring that the Client Information screen meets interoperability requirements. Currently, EHRs are required to be v.1 compliant. However, EHRs must be USCDI v.3 compliant by Jan. 1, 2026. This will require some changes on Streamline’s side. For example, UCSDI v.3 uses a text field when “other” is selected in a demographic field.
Also, race and ethnicity use a single list rather than being considered two separate data points. Streamline is currently working on development to ensure they meet this deadline. As soon as development details and an ETA are available, counties will be updated.
Additionally, because the data dictionaries for required state reports are not aligned with each other, CalMHSA has been working on a proposal for DHCS to reconsider state reporting, including updating and aligning data dictionaries. We plan to submit our proposal by the end of September. Depending on the response, we may use new data dictionaries to help determine default options for the demographic fields in the Client Information screen.
Once the fields and the defaults have been identified, we’ll be able to expand to meet county needs. CalMHSA’s epidemiologists are working to determine how to best include non-default options while still allowing the data team to gather meaningful data.
At the same time, CalMHSA continues to address some duplicate items. For example, there is now an “Unknown” as well as an “Unknown/Not Reported” option in the ethnicity field. We are working with Streamline to remove this duplicate, ensuring that all clients who have the duplicate are moved to the option that will be kept, so county staff doesn’t have to re-enter the data or have “empty” data when there was data input.
This is a long and complex project, as we continue to work toward simplifying and improving data collection and reporting. Please stay tuned as development progresses.
New Script To Address ‘Not Associated’ Entries
CalMHSA will be implementing a weekly cleanup job through an SQL script, beginning Sept. 30, to address “Not Associated” entries shown in the Scanning (My Office) screen that are unable to be removed by system admins.
Reminder: ICD-10 Annual CMS Updates Coming Oct. 1
More information can be found at Annual ICD-10 Code Updates – 2023 CalMHSA.
Some Procedure Codes Updating to New Pysch Med Note Template Oct. 10
The procedure code series 99341-99345 (Home Visit of a New Patient) and 99347-99350 (Home Visit of an Established Patient) will be changed to the new psych med note template, at the request of some counties, on Oct. 10 at 5 p.m. PST.
Please ensure any affected providers (e.g., crisis residential facilities, medical staff) are aware of this information, and have all notes completed by this date/time as there may be data loss between note templates.