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Behavioral health

Data systems that hold up in behavioral health.

Remote support for community behavioral health organizations to organize records, meet overlapping privacy rules, and report on outcomes in a way clinicians, leadership, and funders can all use.

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Based in Salinas, California. Remote across the United States, with in-person meetings in Monterey and Santa Cruz counties.

Why behavioral health data is harder

Most nonprofits answer to one or two sets of rules about their information. Behavioral health organizations answer to several at once. HIPAA governs client health information. 42 CFR Part 2 adds stricter confidentiality and disposal requirements for substance use disorder records. State licensing rules for mental health centers set their own requirements for clinical records. Grant programs, managed care contracts, and certification frameworks each bring their own reporting measures and documentation expectations.

Those rules don’t stay neatly inside the electronic health record. They follow the information wherever it ends up: EHR exports saved to a shared drive, billing and claims files, quality-improvement spreadsheets that reference client populations, HR folders, and training materials that were never meant to hold client details but sometimes do. The risk in a behavioral health organization is rarely one big breach. It’s years of ordinary work leaving sensitive information in places nobody is watching.

At the same time, the stakes for getting the data right are unusually high. Funders want outcomes, not just service counts. Boards want to know whether programs work. And the people being served are often in crisis, with good reason to be cautious about how their information is handled.

Where Klaro starts

Klaro’s founder spent ten years in direct social services before moving into data work: case management, crisis stabilization, outreach and engagement, and harm reduction counseling, across nonprofits, county government, community colleges, and private agencies. That background shapes how the work is done. Systems are designed around how clinicians and case managers actually document and look for information, not around how a software vendor imagines they should.

In practice, that means three things.

  1. Understand the work before proposing structure

    The first step is always to learn how information moves through the organization today: who creates it, where it lives, who needs it, and what rules touch it. No new platform gets recommended until that picture is clear.

  2. Separate what should happen from what rules apply

    A file can be a routine archive candidate and still need a compliance review before anyone touches it. Keeping those two questions apart is how sensitive material stops slipping through on the strength of an ordinary-looking decision.

  3. Build for the people who stay

    Documentation, naming standards, and workflow guides are written so the next program director or IT lead can follow them. The goal is a system the organization runs on its own after the engagement ends.

How Klaro helps behavioral health organizations

Records and data systems

Shared-drive and records audits, classification against privacy and retention requirements, folder and naming standards, and migration planning that doesn’t carry old problems into new systems. For a behavioral health organization, that includes flagging potential health information, substance use records, licensing records, and access-control issues before any file is moved or deleted.

Nonprofit data systems consulting →

Program evaluation

Measurement frameworks, survey and instrument design, and findings reports for programs where outcomes are hard to measure and the people being served deserve to be asked well. Evaluation is designed with confidentiality in mind from the start, not retrofitted once data collection has begun.

Program evaluation consulting →

Dashboards and reporting

Reporting tools that turn EHR and program data into something leadership and funders can act on, calibrated to how staff actually work and to the measures your grants and contracts require.

Dashboards and reporting consulting →

In practice: a behavioral health records audit

A community behavioral health center in New Hampshire had nearly three decades of files on a single shared drive, with no naming standard, no retention schedule, and no clear ownership. Klaro inventoried and classified all 23,220 files and folders without moving anything. About 4,100 were escalated for compliance review before any action. The organization is now working through implementation with a records-migration vendor, using the audit as the foundation.

Behavioral health center

Sorting 23,000 files without breaking anything

Classified 23,220 files and folders across an unmanaged shared drive into a seven-code disposition schema, flagging about 4,130 items for compliance review before anything moved.

Ongoing since March 2026

Common questions from behavioral health teams

Do you need access to our EHR?

Usually not to start. Much of the risk sits outside the EHR, in exports, shared drives, and spreadsheets. When EHR data is needed for reporting, access is scoped to what the work requires and handled under a business associate agreement.

Can you work with our compliance officer?

Yes, and that’s the expected setup. Klaro organizes the evidence and recommends actions. Compliance, and counsel where needed, make the calls on regulated records.

Is this remote?

Yes. Klaro works remotely with organizations across the United States.

For a practical starting point, read Nonprofit records retention: what to keep, what to purge, and who decides.

Start with a conversation.

If your organization is preparing for a migration, an audit, a new reporting requirement, or just can’t find what it needs, a first conversation costs nothing and usually clarifies what kind of help, if any, makes sense.

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