Originally published in Yuma Sun on July 16, 2026. Republished on Contexture.org on August 5, 2026. The original article can be found HERE.
Jennifer Diaz-Montano is director of Health Information at M.I.K.I.D., Mentoring & Inspiring Kids in Development, an Arizona nonprofit that has provided behavioral health services to children and young adults statewide since 1987.
A parent in Yuma gets the call no one wants: their teenager has been admitted to a psychiatric facility after a mental health crisis. By the time they arrive at the hospital, they’re frightened, overwhelmed, and trying to hold it together for their child. They are not, in that moment, thinking about which behavioral health support team to call next. They’re just trying to breathe. That’s the moment that determines what happens next for that family.
At M.I.K.I.D., Mentoring & Inspiring Kids in Development, we serve Arizona kids and young adults from birth through age 25 with behavioral health needs. We’ve been doing this work for decades, and what we’ve learned is that the most fragile window in a child’s behavioral health journey isn’t the crisis itself. It’s the days right after, when a family is exhausted, scared, and trying to navigate a system they didn’t ask to learn.
Hear from Jennifer Diaz-Montano, Director of Health Information at M.I.K.I.D.
If we don’t show up in that window, families can fall through the cracks. They miss appointments or stop returning calls. The child’s care gets interrupted, and the next crisis comes faster than the last one. Thankfully, we’ve been able to show up because Arizona has a statewide health information exchange, run by the nonprofit Contexture, that delivers a real-time notification the moment one of our members is admitted to or discharged from a participating facility anywhere in the state. Our team gets the notification, and a family support partner show up in person, often before the family has finished processing what’s happening. We can ask the family what they need and help them figure out what comes next.
This is the daily work of a behavioral health nonprofit trying to support families where they are, which, in a crisis, is rarely where you expect them to be. What surprises people when I describe how this works is how simple it is. We get a notification and start showing up to support the family. That’s it. The sophistication is on the back end, in the data infrastructure Arizona has spent years building. What we do with it is strengthen families.
Behavioral health is personable work. You could send a text, leave a voicemail, or send a portal message. But the families we serve, especially in the days after a crisis, often can’t act on any of that. They’re in survival mode. What reaches them is a face at the door. Without real-time notifications, we find out a child was admitted when the family finally calls us back, if they do. By then, we’d already missed the hardest days.
The infrastructure Arizona has built is only as strong as the organizations connected to it. The organizations we’d most want to see connected are often the ones that aren’t – small agencies and rural behavioral health nonprofits serving families who don’t have second and third options. Some haven’t considered it. Some have looked into it but decided they can’t afford it. And the families they serve are the ones with nowhere else to turn.
We’ve been part of the HIE since the beginning, through name changes and platform changes and every other kind of change that comes with building something new. We’ve stayed because the alternative is showing up less. And for the kids and families we serve, less isn’t good enough.
