Martin Lovelace-Chandler's Laserfiche workstation

Born with a form of cerebral palsy that limits his motor skills and speech, Lovelace-Chandler has embraced technology with a purpose and passion in his life and career—at least as much as the technology has been able to keep up with the ambitions of the now-married father of two. “In college [in the late ‘90s], I really wanted to go into computers but I didn’t have a way to type or to use a mouse,” he says. After Lovelace-Chandler became an ASN client a decade ago, Dr. Vire had a great idea: to make ASN’s client files accessible to staff by scanning cumbersome paper files to disc. “It was just costing the agency storage every month. He asked me if I could help. I told him I can do anything on a computer if he just gets me the right equipment,” Lovelace-Chandler remembers.

The “right equipment” has changed a lot over the years. Realizing it needed a network solution to make scanned information more easily accessible to staff, ASN implemented a Canofile imaging system in 2006, but quickly found it fell short of its promise. Lack of indexing and usability meant ASN’s 20-plus case managers were still using three-inch thick paper files—sometimes three or four of them per client—which were time-consuming to locate and use and even more resource-consuming when it came to storage and auditing. It was “nightmare-ish stuff,” as Dr. Vire remembers. The one bright spot was that Lovelace-Chandler started using a combination keyboard and mouse that allowed him to program hotkey shortcuts—“macros and micros,” he calls them—that cut the keystrokes required to open up programs like Canonfile from 10 to two. “This allowed me to spend more time on the program itself and gave me total independence,” he says.

Over time, just as Lovelace-Chandler upgraded his communication device to a simpler and more comprehensive “Eco 14” model, ASN likewise upgraded to Laserfiche in 2008. The reason was twofold: “We wanted to be able to have all current and past files on Laserfiche so then it would be at everyone in the agency’s fingertips,” Lovelace-Chandler says. “We also wanted a program that would have a higher security feature after the HIPAA law went into effect.”

Although Dr. Vire admits that system adoption initially took time—not everyone was as attuned to the benefits of using technology as Lovelace-Chandler—the impact has been real.

“There was a time when, if we had a question about an individual’s plan from last year, we had to send someone to a storage unit and hope they could find the correct file, and then hope that the information was in the correct place. We almost always found the document, but the time invested was huge. We can now find that document in minutes rather than hours—and we’ve never had a water leak that left our Laserfiche files water-logged and unusable,” he says. “Laserfiche is definitely a time and money saver.”

For Lovelace-Chandler, a key benefit is how easily he can set up and administer ASN’s Laserfiche system for the case managers who use it on a daily basis. In addition to processing the 200 or so documents generated in the field every day, Lovelace-Chandler has added indexes for medical history, case manager notes and program plans, among other documents. “I’m able to use drop down lists for 98% of the fields,” he says. “It allows documents to be located faster and more efficiently.” And, he adds, securely.

“Laserfiche allows me to give only the people that should be seeing a certain region access. So for example, a case manager might have several consumers out of several regions, but that case manager only has access to each consumer that they are assigned—it’s a lot easier to them to access, and I love that security is set up differently,” he explains. “On Canofile any person could look up any consumer and see all their files. Now, with Laserfiche, I can assign that consumer just to who actually needs access. We also set up groups for each department. For example, Human Resources can’t access supported living files and vice-versa. We really like this because we can track who all is accessing all the files.”

He particularly likes Laserfiche’s support for Window Active Directory. “Almost every day I use the multi-media function to add employee names to the list.”

Another area of improvement has been auditing. As a healthcare services provider with funding and oversight from state and national agencies including the Department of Health and Human Services (which monitors HIPAA compliance), the Arkansas Department of Human Services and the Division of Developmental Disabilities Services, ASN is subject to frequent audits—as many as four per year. “We had an agency that told us that we had so many days to find documents or our agency would be fined. I was able to look up and send them every document they wanted. I would have spent twice the amount of time looking for the documents if we were still using Canofile,” Lovelace-Chandler says.

In addition to using Laserfiche for case management, Lovelace-Chandler also uses it to manage payroll, HR and AP processing. The plan, says Kevin Dickinson of ASN’s Laserfiche reseller, Preferred Office Products, is to implement Quick Fields, possibly even equipping case managers with netbooks to directly input their notes, freeing up Lovelace-Chandler’s time.

“I feel that having Laserfiche we will be able to do bigger and better things in the future. I also feel that it will help us greatly since our agency continues to expand,” says Lovelace-Chandler.

“I have been able to use Laserfiche more than any other program. With the features of Laserfiche it is an easier process to program my device and to use all the features that the program offers. I feel like Laserfiche could open a lot of doors for me or even people like me that have a physical disability,” he adds.

Despite their good intentions, a non-profit business is still a business, and business-related complications arise. Auditors stop by at the end of the year. Vendors may call and say they haven’t received a check for a particular service.

In the past, such inquiries lead to chaotic searches in the accounting department of ACS’s Pennsylvania headquarters.

“We used to have all our checks and back-up documents on microfilm,” says Jerry Hilton, a retiree and part-time ACS staff member. “We could find a month pretty easily, but then we had to scroll through every check to find what we needed. It was very time-consuming.”

ACS installed Laserfiche in order to solve this problem. Now, checks are scanned in to a single repository, where ACS staff can organize them by month, date or vendor. Today, it takes Hilton about three seconds to find a check if he gets a call.

“I just type in the name of the caller, and there are the checks, right there with the back-up forms on the same document,” Hilton says.

ACS plans to expand Laserfiche to other areas of their very important operation. The field services department plans to implement Laserfiche in order to better manage fund-raising event records and treatment information, while HR plans to use the system to digitize employee files.

And if telephone callers no longer have to be put on perma-hold while panicky clerks scurry to find a missing file—that’s a big step forward in client relations.

The Compensation Advisory Organization of Michigan (CAOM) took that step two years ago, when it converted its paper files to document imaging by Laserfiche. And, says Senior Vice President Jon Heikkinen: “We can’t say how much we’re pleased with it, it’s just been excellent, in our opinion.”

CAOM is a nonprofit service agency supported by the 200-some insurance companies— which supply a quarter-million Michigan employers with workers’ comp insurance, required by state law. It runs annual computer studies comparing individual employers’ loss experience against their premium rates; then it reduces rates for businesses with good safety records, and raises them for the higher-risk companies. Simply put, one of CAOM’s assignments is to make sure that safety pays in Michigan.

Another is to operate the Michigan Workers’ Compensation Placement Facility, an assigned-risk pool, to make sure that every employer, even those with high loss experience, can get some kind of insurance protection. About 10 percent of Michigan employers must take this relatively expensive high-risk insurance.

That’s not all. The organization also receives and files copies of each company’s workers’ comp policy; and makes them available, on demand, to the state Labor and Insurance Departments—thus making sure there are no uninsured employers. Finally, for the Insurance Bureau, it submits an annual report of the entire insurance program. All these functions added up to quite a big job for a staff of 45 persons, working desk-to-desk in one vast office nearly a quarter-acre in size. As Mr. Heikkinen put it recently:

“We had massive amounts of paper files. Companies or agents would telephone in to our client service area—say it was something about an application for [high risk] pool insurance. Well, the service person would not have a copy of that document on his desk; he’d have to go back in the file room, somewhere in 2,000 square feet of open-bay storage. Some of those files were 40 years old and still active. Anybody could request them; we’d have to come up with them.”

Misfiling was a continuing problem, Mr. Heikkinen said.

“It would be very crucial … quite a few people would have to go on a file search. They would spend half an afternoon looking for a single file. It might be sitting on some person’s desk or anywhere in the place… they’d spend a good part of an afternoon looking for an important file. That doesn’t happen any more, because with Laserfiche Document Imaging, we were able to reorganize our office. We threw out 250,000 files. We have a huge waste basket on wheels, probably twice as big as the average garbage can in somebody’s garage. We filled that thing and rolled it down to the dumpster— somebody counted—250 times. First, of course, they were all scanned into the Laserfiche document imaging system.”

The two-year changeover saved CAOM about 2,000 square feet of expensive storage space, Mr. Heikkinen said. The collection of side-by-side desks, filling a barn-like office has been reorganized into friendly clusters of private cubicles. Each cubicle has its own PC, and all are linked in a Local Area Network tied, through a server, into a “jukebox” CD-ROM player the size of a small office-type refrigerator. Now, when there is a call for a file, the clerk doesn’t leave his/her cubicle: a few key-taps and the document appears instantly on the clerk’s monitor screen. Up to 25 people can read the same document simultaneously, if they desire.

The system was planned and set up by Oak Soft Consulting, Inc., of Southfield, MI, a suburb of Detroit. “Terry Warns (president of Oak Soft) was a big, big asset to us.” Mr. Heikkinen said. Oak Soft has enjoyed a steady working relationship with CAOM. Oak Soft provides Laserfiche planning, installation and support for companies in the Midwest.

The CAOM executive said that originally, cost had been a troubling factor. “I’d had quotations from other companies in the six-figure range, for software alone,” he said. “I wasn’t going to go to my governing committee and say ‘Give me a million dollars and I’ll make the system work.’ I didn’t know whether it would work. Then Terry came along and said ‘Why don’t we start small, with this system that we can make work, for an initial investment of $50,000, including hardware and software—just five users, and, if you like it, we can expand from there ?’ So we did that. We made that initial investment of $50,000. And we liked it so much that we made another investment of $50,000 right after it. And we’re probably going to expand some more.

“Frankly, for the money we spent, I think we got a lot.”