March 21, 2025
Following are this week’s updates. If you have questions, please contact ehr@calmhsa.org.
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Help Desk Service Now With CalMHSA
CalMHSA has fully transitioned to managing all Help Desk services and has implemented HubSpot for ticket management and online chat.
For Support:
- Visit 2023.calmhsa.org
- Click the chat bubble in the bottom right corner of the page to access Live Chat or Submit a Support Ticket
Questions? Contact us through the channels above.
November MSP in Production
We are pleased to announce that the November MSP will be loaded to counties production environments on March 24.
December and January MSPs are now available in QA systems for testing. Detailed information about the changes in the release has been segmented into three parts, available in these links: December, Part 1 and Part 2; January, Part 1 and Part 2.
Please encourage key members of your team to review and test any item(s) relevant to your work. To aid review of these build release items, below is a guide to the color-coding used in the attached documents:
- Green: Changes have been tested and deployed to production as part of a prior hotfix build. No need to test (unless you would like to double-check the changes).
- Pink: Changes that CalMHSA is testing; no need for county testing unless there is specific interest. However, background information may be missing without access to internal communications.
- Yellow: New functionality introduced to the system. Anything not highlighted in pink is not directly related to one of the CalMHSA tasks but could be worthwhile to review.
- Strikethrough: Changes in functionalities not being used by CalMHSA or its supported counties.
Medical Record/Quality Assurance User Role and Delete Permission
Following a report from a county that a user was able to delete a scanned document. CalMHSA discovered that there was no permission item for delete function; as a result, all users were able to delete scanned documents. CalMHSA has now worked with Streamline to create a permission that grants delete capability only to the County Affiliate SysAdmin user role.
We have received a request to also grant the permission that the Medical Records/Quality Assurance user role in order to regain the ability to delete scanned documents. Counties that may have feedback about this change are asked to send it to ehr@calmhsa.org by April 3. If no negative feedback is received by April 3, the change will be made on April 4.
CalMHSA Help Desk Closure – March 31 Holiday
The CalMHSA Help Desk will be closed on March 31 in observance of the Cesar Chavez holiday. Any tickets submitted on this day will be reviewed and responded to on the next business day.
Tracking Contacts by Non-Clinicians in Contact Notes
Counties have been requesting a method for tracking contacts between non-clinicians and clients. CalMHSA has generally recommended entering information in the “comment” field in the service note for such contacts as reminder calls and documenting when a client cancels. However, counties have provided other use cases that cannot be addressed in this manner (e.g., documenting attempts to contact a client for an initial appointment).
During CalMHSA’s testing, we found that the “Notify Team” and “Notify Staff” functionality does not respect CDAG. When a user opts to notify the treatment team, all members of the treatment team, regardless of program or CDAG, will see information about this contact. The same is true for “notify staff,” although that would be notifying a single staff member. Because this represents a breach risk, we will create permission records for these checkboxes. This change will occur on April 4 unless we receive negative responses from counties.
Some counties are using SmartCare’s out-of-the-box contact notes functionality, which CalMHSA believes is an appropriate use. This list page appears to be CDAG’d, and the details screen is locked upon marking a contact as “complete.” A number of global codes are associated with these screens; CalMHSA believes it is acceptable for counties to change these to address their individual needs. CalMHSA will develop a knowledge base article about contact notes to provide additional information to counties.
Please note that contact notes are not documents and, therefore, will not show up in the “Documents (Client)” list page. Some counties have requested that contact notes be added to the Documents list page, but this is not possible, as it is not the right type of screen.
We are open to feedback about this decision, including hearing about use cases for which this functionality does not work, ways in which counties have successfully used the contact notes functionality, and any other ideas.
Please email ehr@calmhsa.org with “Contact Notes” in the subject line to provide feedback. CalMHSA may refer to some feedback in future newsletters or add them to the upcoming knowledge base articles to help other counties implement contact notes.
Open Payments Database
Counties may have seen a notice that states, “The Open Payments database is a federal tool used to search payments made by drug and device companies to physicians and teaching hospitals. It can be found at openpaymentsdata.cms.gov.”
A physician or surgeon must review with the patient, and the patient must co-sign a note with this disclosure statement per requirement. This task needs to be completed through any note used by these providers in SmartCare. For ease of use, they will use the “open payment database” keyphrase. There is no requirement for an MD or DO to disclose what those payments are and to whom. They must provide the information on the open payments database to their patient. To be added inside the document, click on ‘Use’ for the keyphrase.
If a user prefers to move the disclosure statement to county/individual keyphrases for ease of use or chooses to modify the text, they can do so by copying it from CalMHSA’s keyphrases. Please do not modify the CalMHSA keyphrases; this will alter text for all other users in your county.
Instructions on the workflow will follow and will be posted on CalMHSA website.
Reports Moved to New Page on Website
On the website, the Reports page has been merged with the Accessing Data in SmartCare page. The Reports System Administration page will remain as is.
Service Authorization Request Q&A
CalMHSA has received many questions about the Service Authorization Request process in SmartCare. As a result, we have scheduled a Q&A session for counties on April 8 at 2:30 p.m. Please follow this link to register. Counties that would like specific questions to be addressed in that session can send them to ehr@calmhsa.org. CalMHSA will also create a Knowledge Base article in the future.