TADT 2025 Design Changes (for 2026 Submission)

Status Updates

7/9/2025: Development Request – Submitted request to development team

Sections

Currently, the documents are organized into a single section. We will be changing these documents to have multiple sections to improve user experience. Sections will be:

1. Initial Request
2. Initial Appointment
3. Follow Up Appointment
4. Out-of-Network Referral
5. Access Record Closure

Not all documents will have all sections, as some are not applicable to certain types of services.

Update Fields

There are a few changes to fields that need to be addressed.

In the DMC-ODS Outpatient record, there is a new question for Withdrawal Management. This field will be added and the global code for Appointment Type will be updated.

The DMC State Plan records have been greatly changed to match DMC-ODS tracking, apart from lacking the out-of-network provider referral question. The DMC State Plan documents will be updated fully to meet new requirements.

UI Timeliness

Currently, the timeliness calculations are entirely done in the background. We will be changing these documents to show the results of the timeliness calculations in the user interface (UI). This will include:

1. Offered Timeliness for First Appointment
2. Rendered Timeliness for First Appointment
3. Initial Appointment Timeliness Standard
4. Offered Timeliness for First Follow Up Appointment
5. Rendered Timeliness for First Follow Up Appointment
6. Follow Up Appointment Timeliness Standard

The timeliness calculations and standards will continue to be calculated based on how the document is filled out. For example, if the request is marked as urgent, the system will measure timeliness in hours rather than business days.

This will also include the addition of a user-editable field to indicate whether the client was delayed access to services, based on the timeliness standards. This was done because some counties disagreed with the calculations or reported the calculations were incorrect. This field will auto-populate based on the timeliness calculations and standards of the corresponding offered appointment, but users can change this if desired.

Radio Buttons Instead of Checkboxes

Currently, there is a checkbox for “Follow Up Appointment NOT Offered”. Counties have reported this is confusing and that QA staff are not sure if the user forgot to complete this question or if the checkbox was left blank because there was a follow up offered. We will be changing this to be a radio button rather than a checkbox and rewording the question to be “Was the client offered a follow up appointment?” The options will be “Yes”, “No”, and “Not Applicable”. While we discussed potentially defaulting this value, upon reviewing different real-life workflows, CalMHSA determined it would be better to not default this value based on the values in other fields.

While not discussed explicitly on the county call, upon writing the requirements after the county meeting, CalMHSA felt that county QA staff would also have difficulty determining whether this question was completed or missed in the same way as other checkboxes. CalMHSA therefore decided to change the checkbox fields regarding urgency and prior authorization to radio buttons. The urgency question will be slightly reworded from “Urgent: (if selected, time fields are required)” to “Urgent: (if yes, time fields are required)”. This field will default to “No” but will be editable by end users. The Prior Authorization question will not be reworded but logic will be added that this field is only editable when Urgent = Yes. When Urgent = Yes, this field will default to No. If Urgent = No, the question will be visible but un-editable and will not have either Yes or No selected. (If Urgent was Yes, but is changed to No, the Prior Auth field will be changed to NULL [no response]).

Out-of-Network Provider Question Should be Required

A county requested that the field “Was the client referred to an Out-of-Network provider?” be required. DHCS’s guidance is currently unclear on when this field is required or not. (In the instructions tab of the TADT, guidance indicates this field is only required if Prior Authorization = Yes. However, on tab where requests are reported, this column indicates this field is always required.) Counties on the call agreed to move forward with making this required, with no county expressing concern about this change. The corresponding comments field will not be required, as the current TADT documents do not indicate that any comments are needed for this question.

Indicate Which Comments Fields are Included in the State Report

A county requested that the comments fields be made more clear on whether the comments would be included in the state report file or not. They expressed that some staff enter comments thinking they are internal-only and enter comments that may not be appropriate for DHCS to see. It was also difficult for QA staff to know what to expect on the TADT report, since some comment fields were included and others were not. Counties agreed to this change, with no county expressing concern about this change.

We will be adding either “will be included on state reporting file” or “will not be included on state reporting file” next to the label for each comments field on these documents. CalMHSA reviewed the current official DHCS TADT documents to determine which comments fields were required.

Validation Confirmation

A county indicated that some validations were not working correctly, such as being able to select “Other” for Closure Reason and not being required to enter the description in the “If other, explain” field. CalMHSA agreed to review the validations currently existing on these documents and update as needed.

Update Reports

We will update the CalMHSA TADT Report and CalMHSA Timely Access Document Report to match field updates made in the documents. This will include adding DMC State Plan records to these reports.

CalMHSA has also decided to stop excluding clients without a CIN for the CalMHSA Timely Access Document Report, as this report is used by QA staff to determine what corrections may need to be made. Having a report that shows records where a CIN is missing may alert the QA staff to ensure the CIN is subsequently entered. Records without a CIN will still be excluded from the CalMHSA TADT Report, as that is used to directly submit to DHCS and submitting without a CIN will result in an automatic record error.

A county also reported that since the CalMHSA TADT Report returns results with formatting (e.g. 02 rather than 2), the export of this report results in the field having an apostrophe before the code (e.g. ’02 rather than 02). The county indicated that when pasting into the official DHCS TADT, they must manually delete all the apostrophes. This may be due to DHCS updating the formatting of their official TADT document. CalMHSA agreed to review this as part of this update.

UPDATE: CalMHSA has reviewed this concern and found this only to occur when a user exports to CSV. Once the user attempts to open the CSV file, the user gets a popup asking if they’d like to convert the formatting or not. If the user selects “do not convert”, windows will insert a leading apostrophe to ensure the data is pulled in exactly as exported. If the user selects “convert”, the apostrophe is not created, and the system will change the value from “02” to “2”. This should work fine when copying and pasting into the DHCS document. If you’re exporting to CSV instead of exporting to Excel, please select “Convert” to ensure no apostrophes are added.