ONC updates behavioral‑health data

A lot of behavioral-health information still moves like a fax in a smartphone world: a clinic exports a document, another clinic scans it, and the most useful details end up trapped in a PDF instead of flowing into software fields a doctor can actually query. In March 2026, the Assistant Secretary for Technology Policy and Office of the National Coordinator said it updated the United States Core Data for Interoperability Plus behavioral-health list to change that. (uscdiplus.healthit.gov) The basic idea is simple: health-data exchange works better when everyone agrees on the same boxes and labels. The United States Core Data for Interoperability is the federal baseline list of health data meant for nationwide exchange, and United States Core Data for Interoperability Plus adds extra fields for specific programs and use cases that need more detail than the baseline provides. (healthit.gov, isp.healthit.gov) Behavioral health has been one of the messiest areas to standardize because care happens across hospitals, outpatient clinics, substance-use treatment programs, telehealth platforms, and Certified Community Behavioral Health Clinics. The behavioral-health implementation guide says that fragmentation has historically blocked care coordination and slowed the integration of mental-health and substance-use treatment with the rest of medicine. (build.fhir.org) That is where Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources comes in. Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources is the modern health-data format used in many application programming interfaces, so instead of sending one giant document, a system can send small structured pieces like medications, encounters, or assessments that another system can pull in automatically. (build.fhir.org) The new move is not just “here is a list of fields.” The behavioral-health implementation guide now includes a crosswalk that ties behavioral-health data elements to specific Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources elements, with worked examples showing how items like allergies, health assessments, clinical notes, and patient demographics are represented in practice. (build.fhir.org) The updated behavioral-health list covers two use cases named by the government: Overarching and Comprehensive Care. The March 2026 announcement describes those updates as a milestone for exchanging behavioral-health information in a more standardized way across settings that treat adults, adolescents, and children with mental-health and substance-use disorders. (uscdiplus.healthit.gov, fhir.org) If you want the concrete version, the implementation guide publishes a table of behavioral-health elements and shows data classes that include clinical notes, encounter information, health-status assessments, and vital signs. That means a software team does not have to guess where those facts belong when building an application programming interface for a behavioral-health workflow. (build.fhir.org) This matters because a field that lands in a standard application programming interface can be searched, filtered, and reused, while a sentence buried on page 18 of a scanned document usually cannot. The federal push here is to move behavioral-health data from “human-readable only” records toward machine-readable exchange that can plug into the same digital pipes already used elsewhere in healthcare. (healthit.gov, build.fhir.org) The update also shows how the federal strategy is shifting from naming data to making data implementable. The United States Core Data for Interoperability tells the industry what information should travel, and the Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources mapping tells developers how to make that information travel in real software. (healthit.gov, build.fhir.org, build.fhir.org)