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Orgo-Life the new way to the future Advertising by AdpathwayZach Dauphinais is the clinical informatics manager for United Services, a nonprofit behavioral health organization serving 22 towns in the rural Northeast corner of Connecticut. He recently spoke with Healthcare Innovation about why his organization is eager to work with Connie, the state’s health information exchange, on a pilot project involving electronic consent management solution for substance use disorder (SUD) encounter and clinical data.
Connie was selected as one of nine recipients of Behavioral Health Interoperability Pilot Grants from the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Technology Policy/Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT (ASTP/ONC) and the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA).
Besides United Services, the HIE is also working with another behavioral health provider, Community Health Resources.
Dauphinais said that United Services has already found a lot of value in working with Connie. “It's really helped us with care coordination, particularly as we became certified community behavioral health center, almost four years ago,” he said. “A big part of that is care coordination. And with Connie, we've been much more able to track clients, find out where clients are receiving services and coordinate that care. So it's been a game changer for us.”
However, the pain points for United Services are around consent and the privacy concerns around 42 CFR Part 2, which can be challenging because a lot of their clients have dual diagnoses — they receive both substance use services and mental health services, and there's no clean way to share that data.
This pilot is looking to help with that by automatically identifying that substance use data that needs to be held to a higher privacy standard.
"Without that, we just wouldn't be able to share data. So we haven't been able to share data up until this point on those patients,” he said. Dauphinais added that the pilot will use a list of terms and codes that have been identified by CRISP Shared Services (Connie’s tech partner) and that indicate that somebody may be receiving substance use disorder treatment or anything else that covered under 42 CFR Part 2.
“By using those diagnosis codes, treatment codes, and medications, we can automatically identify without having to manually go through a chart and notify that this is a chart that needs extra consent. It will happen automatically on the back end, which is not only a time saver, it just wouldn't be possible without this.” United Services’ next step in this process is developing conversations with the clients about why this data is important to share, and if they are interested in providing consent, and then capturing that consent in Connie.
Jenn Searls, Connie’s executive director, said this consent issue has been a challenge as long as she has worked in healthcare, including when she served as CIO of a large primary care practice. “At that point, it was still picking up the phone, having to call the behavioral health provider, perhaps getting a fax over. And then, if I did have a fax, how are we going to get that information into the electronic medical record? We were very proud of having transitioned to an electronic medical record, and then we still had these paper records that we somehow had incorporate. In the intervening years, it's really gotten no better. As we think about SAMHSA and SUD and 42 CFR Part 2 laws, those have been very prescriptive and restrictive in terms of data sharing. And then each state is going to have additional regulations and laws surrounding this.”
The state of Connecticut’s five-year IT plan had identified behavioral health interoperability as a key concern, Searls said. Also, Connie’s patient and family advisory council was pretty strong in urging the HIE to move in this direction. “This seemed like the perfect opportunity to take a federal grant and marry it with work we wanted to do, and then see if we could really push this through for the state and for its residents.”
Searls said she sees this as offering the ability to leverage the consent tool they’ve built to enable that better process for care coordination and transition for the behavioral health partners that are participating in this grant with Connie. “We built our own consent tool, because we know that we are working with a lot of organizations that are doing whole-person care, and we want to be able to honor patients’ ability to provide consent with their provider or through our patient portal. We want to be able to track that consent, and we want to be able to encourage our behavioral health partners to feel confident that we have a toolset that will honor that consent and follow with the data as it goes.”
The overall goal is to spread use of the tool to the other behavioral providers in Connecticut. “We’re really hopeful that we can show that this does work, and we can demonstrate what’s involved in it, and that we can really get more organizations comfortable with using this,” Dauphinais said.
The pilots represent 45 exchange partners across Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Massachusetts, North Carolina, Oregon, Rhode Island, and Washington, D.C.
Set to be completed by the end of 2026, they will inform future standards, technical specifications, and policy considerations for the broader health provider community and shape future resources for the behavioral health community.
For instance, in Oregon the MyCarePlanner BH Interoperability project includes four partners led by OHSU. It expands a patient‑driven workflow that enables individuals to consent to and share USCDI+BH data using the MyCarePlanner FHIR app. The goal is to improve care plan accuracy and continuity across behavioral health and primary care settings.
The BHX Connect project in Colorado will create a workflow for seven behavioral health providers to exchange a targeted set of USCDI+BH data elements through a centralized HIE hub. This work aims to improve transitions of care for individuals exiting institutional settings.
The pilots will begin testing the USCDI+ Behavioral Health (USCDI+ BH) dataset and the FHIR Behavioral Health Profiles Implementation Guide (BH IG) in diverse real-world behavioral health settings. USCDI+ BH was developed by ONC and SAMHSA and informed by a public comment period, to improve the effectiveness and reduce the costs of data capture, use, and exchange for behavioral health providers.
ONC said the pilots will implement provider-informed, community-driven projects that address interoperability, privacy, consent, and 42 CFR Part 2 requirements. Lessons learned will inform refinements to the USCDI+ BH dataset and standards. Information gathered from the pilots will also guide the development of the Behavioral Health Information Resource, slated for release in 2027, to support scalable, sustainable nationwide adoption.
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