There’s little in life that’s more personal than health care, and those of us who have faced serious illness know how important it is to receive quality care from a doctor we trust. Unfortunately, not all medical professionals consistently provide the highest level of patient care, and that’s where, in Texas, the Texas Medical Board comes into play.

As the state regulatory agency charged with protecting citizens’ health and safety, the Medical Board regulates the practice of medicine in Texas by licensure, discipline and education. It has a legislative mandate to file and track all complaints filed on any doctor licensed in the state—typically hundreds of them a year.

In the past, investigating all of those complaints led to the creation of thousands and thousands of paper documents that could be used in legal proceedings, and shipping and storing them all was a considerable drain on the agency’s resources. Staff members could injure themselves moving boxes of records around, and it could still take hours to find the exact paper document that was required for a legal hearing.

“The ability to retrieve information on demand is critical to legal proceedings and the agency as a whole,” says Anthony Merritt, a systems analyst with the Texas Medical Board. “At times our staff had boxes stacked up to the ceiling all around the office, just to have the appropriate documents on hand when they were needed. It was crazy. They knew there had to be a better way.”

Fits and Starts

The agency deduced that digitizing the documentation associated with complaints was the way to go, and it started by simply uploading and storing content on a number of different file servers. Managing content this way, however, turned out to be a nightmare: Files resided on different servers, and various departments were saving different versions of documents in their own network spots. There was no consistency. There was excessive redundancy. Worst of all, there was no way for an employee to guarantee that the document he was working with was really in its most current form.

Next, the agency opted to install a document management solution from FileNet. It worked well for a while, but as the agency grew and began to offer more services over the Internet, the existing system just couldn’t keep up. Customizing it to different departments’ needs required hiring a contract programmer, which made the cost of upgrading, customizing and maintaining the FileNet solution too high. According to Merritt, the system’s interface was cumbersome, and due to its limited features, “people were starting to avoid using it entirely.”

Comprehensive, Cost-effective Content Management

Once again faced with an untenable system for handling content, The Medical Board reviewed its alternatives and decided that replacing FileNet with Laserfiche—with its more comprehensive capabilities, lower maintenance costs and easier administration—was worth the upfront investment. “Laserfiche nearly tripled our ability to capture and process complaint documents,” explains Merritt. “It saves us time and energy every day.”

Merritt says Laserfiche’s key difference was its customizability to meet the agency’s specific needs. “There were multiple methods to input information into the system. With Quick Fields, we can manipulate the pages we scan in an automated fashion, while Web Access and WebLink allow us to serve documents to our off-site staff and consultants via the internet,” he says. “We’ve customized our system to cut costs dramatically by using less staff time, and ultimately create a better workflow for our agency.”

Specific benefits the Texas Medical Board has realized as a result of implementing Laserfiche include:

• Multi-file format capture. Because Laserfiche has the flexibility to capture multiple types of enterprise content, Medical Board staff are able to scan and store any file provided by the public, including image files, Microsoft Office documents and DVD media.
• Accelerated scanning. Laserfiche reseller DocuData Solutions set up scanning stations that assimilate thousands of documents into Laserfiche in a matter of minutes, saving massive amounts of employee time and storage space.
• Quick and easy data extraction. Laserfiche Quick Fields extracts information from scanned documents and automatically tags them with metadata (including the Bates Numbers required by the agency’s lawyers), enabling instant search and retrieval without adding extra work.
• Flexible file folders. The top-down file structure makes it easy to navigate the Laserfiche content repository, and unlike FileNet, the folder structure in Laserfiche can easily be altered to reflect changes in the way the agency processes documents or organizes itself.
• Granular security features. Rights and permissions based on department and individual job tasks free the IT department from having to constantly guard and monitor the system—while still ensuring that confidential consumer information is protected.
• Remote access. Laserfiche Web Access gives Board members the ability to log into their secure laptops and review all of the relevant case materials through their Web browsers—any time, anywhere, without having to lug boxes of paper records into meetings or rely heavily on support from IT staff.

“With Laserfiche, the Texas Medical Board settles consumer complaints more quickly, allowing us to continually meet our legislative goals,” concludes Merritt. “This is definitely a case where technology has made life easier for us.”

• Link this:
• Print this article

Tags: bates numbering, case management, conversion, legal, regulatory board

Posted on Thursday, November 12th, 2009 at 9:19 am under Customer Stories, State Government, State and Local Government. You can comment on this post.