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Office of Mental Health

Guidelines for Selecting a Security Manager

The Security Manager is the person in each facility who is designated by the Facility Director to use SMS to grant facility staff access to the Patient Characteristics Survey (PCS) and/or PSYCKES Medicaid Web-based applications. Other OMH applications will be added to SMS in the future. After granting a staff person access to an application, the Security Manager will assign the person to a security group. For example, in the PCS users may be assigned to the Supervisor or Submitter security groups. When assigned to the Submitter group, the PCS user will be associated with specific facility unit(s) or site(s).

When choosing the Security Manager for your facility, please consider the following:

  1. The Security Manager will have the ability to grant access to certain OMH applications that house HIPAA Protected Health Information. The Security Manager should therefore be familiar with your facility’s policies for handling confidential information. As a resource, the Security Manager can refer to the OMH Web page that contains HIPAA information for service providers.
  2. Access granted to the SMS applications can and will be audited by the OMH.
  3. The Security Manager should know which staff from your facility need access to each application or should be supervised by someone who does.
  4. The Security Manager must be available to your application users to reset passwords and remove users when necessary.

We are confident that the appropriate selection of a Security Manager for your facility will provide an efficient process of administering SMS access. If you have any further questions, please contact the OMH Helpdesk at 1-800-HELP-NYS (1-800-435-7697)

Comments or questions about the information on this page can be directed to the OMH Helpdesk.