May 15, 2025
Following are this week’s updates. If you have questions, please contact ehr@calmhsa.org.
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Updated Terms of Service for Prescribers
Surescripts, the national clearinghouse employed by prescribing software to transmit prescription information to and from pharmacies (both Medication Rx and CalMHSA Rx employ this functionality) has recently updated its Terms of Service (TOS). Because CalMHSA’s legal counsel has advised it is important that all prescribers are informed of this update, we have created a splash screen at log-in, where staff will be presented with the new TOS and can review and acknowledge them.
The updated Terms of Service are also available in their entirety on the website.
All staff will encounter the log-in message, as functionality doesn’t allow it to be shown only to prescribers. The beginning line of the notice indicates this only pertains to prescribers, and the expectation is that they — prescribers and prescriber support staff — will review the new TOS and click the “acknowledge” button.
If they prefer to review at a different time, they may also click the “later” button, and the log in message will display when they log in again. Non-prescribers can simply click the acknowledge button, and the message will disappear; they do not need to review.
This feature is available in the “Land page messages” screen in SmartCare. Instructions
CalMHSA will enable this on May 15 and can enter this into counties’ system, or counties can enter it on their if they prefer. Please contact ehr@calmhsa.org if you have any questions or concerns.
CalMHSA Responds to HMA With CARE Act Data Dictionary v2.0 Update
HMA has issued a reminder email about the 2025 Q1 submission, indicating that counties were expected to begin using the data dictionary v2.0. CalMHSA has responded to HMA to inform them of the status of our development timeline.
CalMHSA received the new data dictionary on Feb. 28 and has been working since then on operationalizing the numerous changes. This development process will be comprised of determining the requirements, creating a product design, creating a technical design, developing the design, testing, and finally deploying the changes. We have completed the requirements and product design phase and are currently in the early parts of the technical design phase.
This involves determining necessary database changes to meet the requirements and matching as closely as possible the design developed by product members. We will continue to work on implementing the changes, but we do not currently have an ETA of when this will be available for use. Due to the high number of changes and the complexity of the requirements, it is likely that this will not be in production systems for the next submission deadline of Aug. 29.
Care Coordination: Turn On Automatically Requesting Program Enrollment
When CalMHSA explored rolling out the Care Coordination module, we held a pilot with multiple counties involved. The counties determined that, while most of the module needed additional development, the program auto-enrollment was ready for production. CalMHSA presented this decision and functionality to all counties on September 20, 2024; however, not all counties expressed interested in that new functionality, so plans to move it to production environments have been on hold.
At this time, CalMHSA recommends that this functionality be turned on at the CalMHSA level and that counties that wish to opt out may do so. We are also interested in reevaluating county interest and are requesting feedback from counties that may have an objection to CalMHSA’s plan to turn this functionality on. If your county is opposed to this change, please email ehr@calmhsa.org and state your reasons for opposing this decision. In the absence of any negative feedback, CalMHSA will move forward with the process of turning on the program fields for the standard dispositions on June 6.
If your county has already turned on this functionality, your system should not be impacted. If CalMHSA moves forward with this configuration, counties will still be able to turn off this functionality in their system. More information on this topic can be found at Setup Which Dispositions Will Allow for Program Entry.
NOABD Updates Complete
CalMHSA has completed updates to the NOABD letter templates based on BHIN 25-014, using language directly from the BHIN attachments. These have replaced the former NOABD templates in production systems. NOABDs created before May 8, 2025, will not be impacted.
New Training Articles Available
CalMHSA has compiled new training articles for recently implemented changes or upcoming updates within SmartCare. Please find the updates sectioned into two groups: general SmartCare notices implemented in the most recent build deployment and May 19 deployment items that will affect CalMHSA Rx.
State Reporting Announcements
State Reporting updates include NACT changes, List Pages and a survey on submitting State Reporting files. Please see below for details.
NACT 274 Sites Screen Consolidation
As of the production deployment on April 28, the 274 Sites screen, which was previously only utilized for DMC-ODS sites, is now the primary location for maintaining NACT 274 site-level detail for both MH and DMC-ODS sites. This was a multi-county, multi-month process involving both the data conversion of MH Program level data to the 274 Sites screen and coding updates to point to the new data sources. Existing data fields within the Programs detail screen will continue to remain accessible but are expected to be phased out at some point in the future.
ACT 274 v3.01
CalMHSA has been working in collaboration with Streamline to develop and release CG v3.01 updates to county environments since DHCS announced the release of a new NACT 274 Companion Guide (CG) earlier this year. The first updates were delivered as primarily UI revisions to county QA environments in early April and to production environments on April 28. A second set of updates was delivered on May 6 to county QA environments adding initial CG v3.01 support to the .dat file generation algorithms. Additional revisions will be added throughout the remainder of May to add full support for IBHP reporting. With recent updates to DHCS’ test system on May 1 to support the new v3.01 format, CalMHSA and counties will have the next several weeks to evaluate and revise the recent system updates, with most updates target for production availability by May 26.
State Reporting List Pages Transition to Effective Date
For the past several months, CalMHSA has been working to redesign the State Reporting List Pages from an entry date filtering approach to one which relies more upon effective date. The List Pages for CSI and CalOMS were the first to receive these updates, with the initial release available in county QA environments on May 6. Those revisions are currently under review and will be discussed at greater length in upcoming State Reporting Office Hours to ensure these List Pages filter data as intended. CANS and PSC List Pages will receive similar updates based on learnings from the changes made to CSI and CalOMS.
State Reporting Status Survey
As announced in last week’s State Reporting Office Hours, CalMHSA is conducting a survey to establish a new baseline for each county’s ability to submit State Reporting files, with the intent of sharing this information with Streamline as part of continuing efforts to prioritize state reporting development.
The survey has been set-up to allow staff to report on only the state reporting areas for which they are responsible. If you have not yet completed the survey, but are responsible for one or more areas of state reporting, please complete the survey today at this link.
Feedback Results: Medical Records/Quality Assurance Delete Permissions
In the April 10 Bulletin we issued a survey requesting feedback on a request from a county to add the ability to delete scanned medical records to the Medical Records/Quality Assurance user role.
Because almost half of the voting counties indicated that this would be problematic, and noted the effort it would take them to reconfigure their system to remove this user role, CalMHSA will not be adding this permission to the Medical Records/Quality Assurance user role. If counties want to add this permission, they may.
Permissions are additive, meaning that if CalMHSA grants this permission to this user role, then all counties using this role would have that permission. A more streamlined approach is for counties to create their own add-on user role to grant a permission, rather than every county creating their own base user role to deny a permission.
We received responses from 19 counties; six counties abstained. Six counties clearly indicated they wanted this user role to have the ability to delete scanned medical records, and five counties clearly indicated that they wanted this user role to not have that ability. The remainder indicated they were indifferent or didn’t have a strong opinion. This represents a 55%-45% split.
Two counties that previously voted also voted again when the reminder came out, which made their results mixed. Even if we used the most recent voting results, the percentages wouldn’t change.
Please feel free to reach out if you have any questions, and thank you for participating in the feedback process. Full Results:
- Yes: Glenn, Kings, San Benito, San Diego, San Luis Obispo, Siskiyou
- No votes: Colusa, Kern, Lake, Santa Barbara, Sonoma
- Abstained: Contra Costa, Humboldt, Madera, Marin, Nevada, Placer
- Indifferent/No Strong Opinion votes: Fresno, Imperial, Mono, Sacramento, Tulare, Ventura
- Mixed votes: San Joaquin (2 Yes, 1 No; most recent No), Stanislaus (1 Indifferent, 1 Yes; most recent Yes)
This Week’s Production Updates
New functionality in the EHR – and what you need to know about it – is available here.