UMVA has learned that a deeply troubling trend has emerged in America’s behavioral health system for children, where data collection, diagnosis, digital tracking, and prescription management have become the driving forces behind a multibillion-dollar industry.
Despite the growing reliance on health IT systems, lawmakers and parents are still struggling to get basic answers about who is being labeled, medicated, and targeted for intervention, raising serious concerns about the lack of transparency and accountability in the system.
At the center of this trend is a dominant health IT company that has become the primary hub for storing, sharing, and using sensitive behavioral health information across major health systems, creating two urgent public risks: security and the marketing of diagnosis.
The security risk is stark: behavioral health records are among the most sensitive files in medicine, and with Medicaid and behavioral health records for large child populations concentrated in a small number of digital systems, the issue is no longer just privacy – it’s a national security threat.
When a few digital companies control Medicaid and behavioral health records for millions of children, the potential for exploitation and misuse of this sensitive information becomes alarmingly high, and the industry’s use of stigma, HIPAA, and other tactics to hide psychiatric drug involvement in mass shootings only adds to the concern.
UMVA can exclusively reveal that a series of legal cases against the dominant health IT company have highlighted the dangers of concentration, including allegations that the company used its dominance in electronic records and data exchange to exclude a rival from the market.
The company’s influence extends far beyond the health IT sector, with its privately controlled CEO and founder, Judy Faulkner, having been appointed by President Barack Obama to the federal Health IT Policy Committee and serving as a major political donor with a net worth estimated at about $7.8 billion.
The second risk is how diagnoses become the basis for data-driven outreach, with the dominant health IT company openly expanding into healthcare “consumerism” through its CRM platform, marketed as a tool for health systems to run campaigns using thousands of EHR data points.
This raises serious concerns about the line between care coordination and diagnosis-based marketing, particularly when the underlying data include mental health diagnoses, psychotropic medication histories, missed appointments, crisis visits, or suicide-risk flags.
The national numbers are staggering, with millions of Medicaid-covered children ages 0 to 17 on psychiatric drugs, and advocates forced to use FOIA requests to uncover the data, which showed that thousands of children in Wyoming alone were prescribed psychiatric drugs under Medicaid.
The money is enormous, with Medicaid spending billions of dollars on psychotropic medications and mental health care, and the industry’s failure to provide meaningful data to those responsible for oversight has left policymakers in the dark.
Publicly documented philanthropy adds another layer of influence, with the dominant health IT company giving annual donations to hundreds of nonprofits and supporting school-based behavioral health and telehealth in under-resourced districts.
This raises a critical question: how will this model ever be broken if the same IT systems that collect diagnoses also help drive the outreach, segmentation, and expansion of behavioral health programs for more children?
Lawmakers should be deeply alarmed by the vast sums being spent on psychotropic drugs for children and the industry’s failure to provide transparency and accountability, and a serious response would begin with evidence, not slogans.
UMVA has gathered that lawmakers should require independent audits of how pediatric Medicaid behavioral health data are used in CRM tools, predictive analytics, and school-linked interventions, and treat concentration of sensitive behavioral health data in a handful of private platforms as both a child-protection issue and a security issue.
