Case Study: Los Angeles County Department of Mental Health achieves coordinated, streamlined care with Netsmart CareRecord

L.A. County CareRecord implementation moves largest local mental health community toward more coordinated care

The Los Angeles County Department of Mental Health (LACDMH) serves more than 260,000 people a year with 4,500+ staff across directly operated and contracted programs, including five downtown clinics treating the most severely mentally ill. Faced with fragmented, paper-based charts and a legacy system holding over 2 million registration records (many duplicates), clinicians struggled with delayed documentation and billing, limited visibility in the field, and difficulty coordinating care across teams.

LACDMH deployed the Integrated Behavioral Health Information System (IBHIS) powered by the Netsmart CareRecord, converting roughly 900,000 records in the initial cutover and rolling the system out in stages using Super User training, vendor-led go‑live support, and automated data imports/web services. More than 3,000 users are live, enabling mobile point-of-care documentation, consistent clinical notes linked to appointments for billing and reporting, improved medication/allergy/suicide-risk checks, better care coordination, and about $3 million already received in Meaningful Use incentive funds.

Los Angeles County Department of Mental Health

Lorraine Viade

Clinical Psychologist