NEWTOWN - Federal legislation to fix the nation’s broken mental health system, now advancing to a Senate vote, was welcomed Thursday as an encouraging sign by parents of Sandy Hook massacre victims.

“Research is really the key right now, because what we need to do is help doctors give more tools to patients so they can get the care they need,” said Jeremy Richman, whose daughter Avielle was among the 26 first-graders and educators slain at Sandy Hook Elementary school in 2012. “This is a huge win.”

Richman was reacting to news that Sen. Chris Murphy’s mental health reform legislation cleared a key committee hurdle on Wednesday in Washington, D.C.

Murphy’s bill would put brain health on equal footing with physical health and establish new programs to encourage early intervention and research.

“I’ve heard hundreds of heartbreaking stories from families struggling to get a loved one the help they need,” Murphy said in a prepared statement. “We all have heard these stories - each of them unique, but somehow exactly the same.”

Murphy will mark passage of his bipartisan bill by the Senate health committee during a noon event Friday with Miriam Delphin-Rittmon, Connecticut’s commissioner of mental health and addiction services, and Mark Barden, the father of a slain Sandy Hook first-grader and co-founder of the nonprofit group Sandy Hook Promise.

Murphy said the bill would clarify confidentiality rules and allow physicians to share mental health information with caregivers of young adults in crisis.

“There’s still work to do here, but this is an incredibly important bipartisan foundation with which we can work,” Murphy said on Thursday.

Nicole Hockley, whose son was slain in the Sandy Hook massacre, agreed.

“We are very excited that it came out of the health committee, and we see no issues that will keep it from clearing the next hurdle and getting to the president’s desk,” said Hockley, also a co-founder of Sandy Hook Promise.

Momentum to address systemic problems in the mental health system has been growing in the wake of the Sandy Hook massacre, when a troubled 20-year-old with a fascination for guns and mass murder committed the worst crime in Connecticut history.

A 2014 state report made no direct connection between the young man’s mental state and his horrific act. But the report did find that his mental health problems, combined with his obsession for weapons and easy access to his mother’s guns, “proved a recipe for mass murder.”

The mental health issue has provided rare common ground for feuding Republicans and Democrats in Congress.

“Motivations can always be questioned, but brain health is a non-partisan issue,” says Richman, who started the Avielle Foundation to better understand the biological basis of violence and the social influences that lead to violent behavior.

“The brain is still the least understood of our sciences, and yet the brain is where our behavior comes from,” Richman said. “esearch is the bridge between biochemistry and behavior.”