Although the doctors’ attention is devoted to delivering excellent patient care, they recognize that if the medical group’s finances aren’t in order, their ability to continue serving patients is compromised. Therefore, they’ve charged their business office with employing the best people, processes and technology to optimize the revenue cycle and ensure the profitability of the practice.

Recession Brings Reimbursement Challenges

“The tough economy and changing California regulations have made it more and more difficult to collect payment in a timely manner,” explains Sue Kruger, Office Manager at Tri City. “Medicare and Medi-Cal pay only a fraction of the fee for emergency services, people who’ve lost their jobs and their health insurance oftentimes can’t pay for their care and private payers sometimes drag their heels.”

She notes that the group’s physicians treat an average of 6,000-7,000 patients a month. In terms of Tri City’s revenue:

• 27% comes from Medicare patients.
• 17-18% comes from Medi-Cal.
• A little over half comes from private insurers and self-pay accounts.

“Our employees have to work much harder to collect the same percentage of payment they did three or four years ago,” says Kruger. “If we didn’t have a paperless system, we’d absolutely have had to hire more staff.”

Integrating Content Management with Practice Management

After transitioning to a new practice management system—CPU’s MED/FM—in 2003, Tri City began thinking about how to get even more value out of that system. When CPU introduced an integration with Laserfiche enterprise content management (ECM), Tri City jumped on board.

“Handling paper was a big expense that slowed our staff down,” says Kruger. “Our doctors recognized that purchasing Laserfiche would pay off in terms of staff productivity.”

J.R. Juiliano, Tri City’s IT Manager, explains, “We scan everything that’s related to patient encounters into Laserfiche. This includes demographic information, dictations, EOBs and correspondence from insurance companies.”

He notes that the hospital sends information to the medical group via an FTP site. “In the past, we just printed everything onsite.”

This, of course, was problematic on many levels:

• It was expensive.
• It was difficult to store.
• It was tough to retrieve in a timely manner.

“We have to keep patient information for seven years,” says Juiliano. “We used to rent four storage units at a facility that’s ten miles away. We kept a year’s worth of records onsite in a big filing room, but somebody had to go over to the storage units at least once a week.”

Kruger adds, “Efficient medical billing depends on keeping people in their seats so they can be productive. Manual tasks like retrieving paper records just aren’t the best use of employees’ time.”

Today, Tri City automates the document capture, indexing and filing processes with the following tools:

• Laserfiche Snapshot converts the electronic documents from the hospital’s FTP site into TIFF images and processes them using Laserfiche Quick Fields, a high-volume document capture and processing tool that automatically extracts metadata from the documents and files them in the Laserfiche repository—no printing or scanning required.
• Laserfiche Quick Fields also scans and processes paper EOBs and correspondence from insurance companies. Using optical character recognition (OCR), Quick Fields converts the scanned images into editable and searchable text, extracts metadata and files the documents in the repository.
• Laserfiche Import Agent captures and processes electronic faxes.

Verifiers, coders and payment entry staff work with dual screens, so they’re able to view a document on one screen while performing data entry into MED/FM on the other. With the MED/FM integration, documents are automatically attached to the appropriate patient records in the practice management system. When employees type a number into a specific field in MED/FM, Laserfiche opens the corresponding document. This ensures that employees don’t have to launch Laserfiche or toggle between screens to retrieve the documents they require.

Kruger explains that the integration keeps her staff in their seats. “Laserfiche makes our staff so efficient that we haven’t had to hire more people. In fact, we haven’t even replaced everyone who’s left.”

Visibility = Productivity

Documents—whether scanned or electronically imported—are time-stamped when they enter the Laserfiche repository so that the management team can measure staff productivity. Kruger explains, “If something comes in at eleven but doesn’t get finished until 4:30 pm, I can go to the person and ask, ‘What were you doing for those five and a half hours?’”

Juiliano appreciates how easy it is to run and store reports in Laserfiche. With Laserfiche Audit Trail, a monitoring and reporting tool, Tri City can create summaries of all actions taken on a particular document or record, making it much easier to prove compliance with HIPAA. “We can see who changed what when, where and why,” he explains.

In terms of other types of reports, Juliano says, “We run a lot of reports—collections reports, month-end reports, weekly reports. Even if we don’t run the report in Laserfiche, we store it there, which makes it easy to access and compare historical data with present trends.”

Lisa Newland, Tri City’s Assistant Manager, notes that the group’s RAC audits have gone smoothly thanks to Laserfiche’s instant search-and-retrieval capabilities. “Being able to instantly pull the information the RAC auditors want to see makes life so much easier than digging through filing cabinets or storage boxes.”

All in all, says Kruger, “Laserfiche is a great product. I don’t know how we ever got along without it.”

The company faced four major challenges:

• Storage: Lack of space in the office for filing cabinets cost the company $650 a month to rent storage sheds. Temperatures inside the sheds often topped 110 degrees, degrading documents and discouraging retrieval by accounting employees.
• Decentralized Files: Every vehicle tow resulted in the creation of documents by multiple departments, each with their own filing methods—which meant accounting employees had to contact at least three departments to complete a vehicle file. From gathering vehicle photos from the sales department and inspections from the vehicle storage facility to tracking down titles in the title department, staff spent more time searching than billing.
• Security: Transferring files among departments compromised security and led to a proliferation of outdated copies.
• Customer Service: Spread-out storage and misfiled contracts made it difficult to deliver towing contracts to customers by 2:00 p.m. on the day following a tow, as outlined in vendor contracts.

“The vehicle could sometimes be moved to another storage or auction facility, and sometimes the files would not get to the new vehicle storage location,” notes Sheila Gallegos, project manager at United Road Towing.

The company put out a request for proposals for an enterprise content management (ECM) product that could:

• Quickly and easily scan documents.
• Read vehicle barcodes and file documents with minimal human effort.
• Perform quality checks on barcoded scans.

After reviewing RFP responses, United Road Towing saw that Laserfiche could easily set a company-wide standard to transition it away from inefficient paper-based processes.

“Laserfiche was the easiest to understand and the most user-friendly by far. Quick Fields and Workflow sessions were doing most the work, instead of our staff,” says Gallegos. “Most importantly, Laserfiche was an enterprise software solution, whereas the other vendors had to piece together other products to create the solution we were looking for.”

Gallegos led a three-month installation and in-depth training process which brought 73 employees in seven departments and seven locations—as well as 23 vendors—onto the Laserfiche system.

“Laserfiche has helped us streamline our processes, and it also helps us make sure that the processes are standardized from location to location,” she says.

Giving the Green Light to Better Records Management

The first step for United Road Towing was standardizing the documentation process from the time a vehicle hitches to a tow truck to when it leaves the tow lot—which brought immediate improvements in customer service and employee efficiency.

A custom integration between Quick Fields, Workflow and the company’s towing software now takes data from vehicle barcodes, driver invoices and customer-submitted documents across many departments for cradle-to-grave records management.

Because the towing software doesn’t contain an open database, the company worked with Laserfiche to create a custom Workflow script with an HTTP post. The script automatically pulls information from the towing software to fill in additional data in Quick Fields.

As outlined below, records management is now much simpler and more consistent:

• When the company tows a vehicle, the truck driver places a barcode sticker on the vehicle to identify it in the vehicle inventory and places a barcode sheet in the storage reports.
• Storage facility staff scans the barcode sheets into Laserfiche.
• Quick Fields reads the barcodes, places the inventory number into a field and saves the storage report in the Laserfiche repository.
• The custom Workflow script runs a session that searches the towing database using the barcode. Quick Fields then fills in additional template fields with retrieved information about the vehicle, such as the vehicle’s make, model, year and VIN number, as well as customer information and invoice and payment dates.
• When all fields are complete, the Workflow session electronically files the documents by tow date.

With the automated system, the average user can process five documents a minute. Each day, the company as a whole can easily process 1,500 customer documents and 500 driver invoices.

WebLink Revs Up Customer Service

The integration has also improved the availability of customer documents within the contractual one-day grace period. Prior to Laserfiche, one employee would collect 200 documents a day from the accounting department, scan the documents into a network folder, rename all the documents, move the documents to an FTP folder and then make the documents available to customers on a Website in PDF form. This time-intensive process often resulted in late documents and $75 in vendor fines for each delayed delivery.

With Laserfiche WebLink, an automated process ensures that customers can view documents on the same day of the tow—many hours before the deadline.

• When a towed vehicle is added to the storage inventory, storage facility employees scan documents from the drivers along with customer-supplied paperwork like driver licenses into a network folder.
• From the network folder, Quick Fields brings the documents into the Laserfiche repository and identifies the documents by reading their barcodes.
• The custom Workflow session retrieves the vehicle information from the towing software using the barcodes, and Quick Fields completes the template fields.
• The accounting office then e-mails digital invoice copies to customers.
• Quick Fields files the documents and automatically makes relevant documents, such as storage reports, driver licenses, private party impounds and pre-tow pictures of the vehicles, available for customers via WebLink.
• Customers can view the files related to their tow with an assigned, secure login.

This fast flow of information empowers United Road Towing as well as the customer. The customer may view the document on the same day as the tow, and United Road Towing now:

• Saves half a pallet of paper (50 boxes) per month.
• Eliminates $650 a month in off-site storage costs.
• No longer needs to train storage employees on a formerly laborious customer service process.

“In the past, a dedicated staff person spent eight hours completing this process. Now, it only takes 30 minutes to verify all the documents that were scanned,” says Gallegos.

Overhauled Processes Bring Big Benefits

United Road Towing counts centralized data as the most basic gain from Laserfiche, which has completely eliminated the company’s reliance on a carrier to move documents from remote sites to the main office.

The rewards multiply when it comes to customer satisfaction. “Now anyone who answers the phone can answer inquiries about the status of a vehicle by doing a simple search in Laserfiche,” notes Gallegos. “We used to have to transfer calls to the storage lot where the vehicle was stored.”

The company’s five storage facilities follow the same procedures, but the company can shift tasks around depending on the available employees and their skill levels. For example, when a customer calls requesting paperwork from their insurance company to release the vehicle to a body shop or the police department inquires after proof of ownership forms, dispatch staff can now look up the related information in Laserfiche instead of relying on lot staff.

More employees can be cross-trained to complete work in multiple departments. Whenever the staff has downtime, employees input and check metadata in Laserfiche from any documents that don’t include barcodes. Recently, the company even changed its file clerk positions into quality assurance roles.

With Audit Trail, Gallegos can run a report that outlines which employees have accessed certain documents. Every month, she uses the report to check productivity and conduct any back-training
for employees based on their efficiency.

United Road Towing is close to completing an expansion to the corporate office in Illinois. Instead of spending money on overnight mailing costs, the company will now digitally send Department of Transportation documents to corporate employees via WebLink.

Other plans for growing United Road Towing’s Laserfiche system include:

• Using the Laserfiche Mobile iPad app to digitize the signed agreement binders that tow drivers currently carry in paper form. Capturing and storing the most current authorization forms will ensure that drivers remain in compliance with local regulations.
• Working with municipalities to write laws that standardize the authorizations needed to tow a vehicle and giving cities access to signed agreements via WebLink.
• Expanding the Laserfiche system to 11 additional sites to further standardize procedures and bring cradle-to-grave records management to the rest of the company.

“Laserfiche has helped to ensure that processes are consistent throughout the company while allowing us to improve processes and gain efficiencies,” Gallegos says. “It’s one of the best investments we’ve ever made.”

“The staff was really good in sitting down and critically looking at how they do business with their documents,” Filippi says. “Because of that, they were able to come up with the identifying fields that process 95% of their documents.”

In a series of narrated screen shots, Filippi provides an overview of the process, along with some best-practice advice:

1. Avoid inputting information from the same document at the same time.
2. Use best practices and practical needs to manage metadata.
3. How the Property Transfers Division configured their template.
4. 67 database fields shared across 26 document templates.
5. “People love stamps here.”
6. Processing ‘Claims for Reassessment Exclusion’ forms.
7. Extracting data from the form.
8. Create templates first to help determine fields.
9. How tokens use fields to name documents.
10. Include the document type in its name for future associated use.
11. Can’t find something? Check the folder path.
12. Use Zone OCR to extract data from a specific area of a document.

*****

1. Avoid inputting information from the same document at the same time.

“When you first open Laserfiche Quick Fields, it tells you the recent sessions you already opened based on your log-in ID. If someone is using that session, you can’t open it—which is good because you’re avoiding the cross-scanning, as I call it,” says Filippi. “You might have people trying to input information from the same document at the same time. Some users don’t like it because they say, ‘Well, it cuts down on productivity,’ but you have to think of the bigger picture here: We want to make sure we have accurate document data in our repository. That overrides everything else, so I’m glad Laserfiche considered that in the software’s design too.”

2. Use best practices and practical needs to manage metadata.

“Metadata management is a good source of one-stop shopping for us to identify what we’re using, what we have as far as templates and fields, and where we can cross reference data and information in our document repository,” says Filippi. The Assessor Recorder’s 26 templates below were developed in-house working with department staff to determine their respective best practices and practical needs. “Everything you see is what we’ve created internally going through the processes, testing and then streamlining.”

3. How the Property Transfers Division configured its template.

“Property Transfers has decided to do ‘one-stop shopping,’ so this is their template,” explains Filippi. “All the field names on the left are common to every single document type they use. What’s really important is on the right under ‘required.’ When staff scans these documents through Quick Fields, the only field that needs to be inputted at the time of capture is the document number. Good or bad, that’s how they’ve maximized their efficiency. They’re identifying their best business processes to help them sort and go to these documents.”

4. 67 database fields shared across 26 document templates.

The Assessor Recorder’s Office uses 67 different types of fields to process and index documents—social security numbers, permit numbers, names, notice dates and so on. “Laserfiche has hundreds and hundreds of field capabilities you use to name your documents or manage your repository with,” Filippi says. “Pretty much everything in our repository that is searchable has a field and is listed here.”

5. “People love stamps here.”

In addition to fields and tags, departments use stamps electronically affixed to a document that employees have customized to their needs and preferences. “As you can see, there’s quite a few of these. I’d like to see less,” Filippi laughs, “but people love stamps here.”

6. Processing ‘Claims for Reassessment Exclusion’ forms.

‘Claim for Reassessment Exclusion’ forms are required by Proposition 58, which exempts a property from tax reassessment when it passes between parents and children. On the left, the ‘Page Processing’ list displays the ‘menu’ of adjustments and refinements that will be made to the document. This session, for instance:

• Runs optical character recognition (OCR – see slide 12 below) to capture the assessor’s parcel number.
• Rotates the document upright.
• Removes blank pages.

“You only have to do this once—when Quick Fields identifies this document type, it will process it according to that configuration,” Filippi says. “Laserfiche has given us a lot of options on how to process documents at the time of capture.”

7. Extracting data from the form.

Says Filippi of the ‘Fields’ highlighted on the right, “When the users created this document, they identified that these pieces of information—the year, the document number, the APN and so on—are all critical to identifying, processing and efficiently moving this document through their business processes.”

8. Create templates first to help determine fields.

Before determining fields, Filippi recommends, “The first step is to create a template for a particular document type,” or a ‘blueprint,’ as he calls it. “Then, from those templates, you get an idea of your fields,” he says. “The important thing is to understand the document types first, which are identified by your templates. And then, what fields you need in each of those documents to make them do what you need them to do.”

9. How tokens use fields to name documents.

The specific metadata fields in the ‘Property Transfers’ template will be used to name the document via a token, seen here in the ‘Default document name’ window ‘Fields.’ “When you see the ‘%’ sign, this is an actual script format that Laserfiche recommends to capture what you’re seeing right now. For ‘document number,’ the syntax is ‘%, bracket, field, doc number.’ Every time we run a session, we tell it, ‘capture this information in the document so our people don’t have to key it.’”

10. Include the document type in its name for future associated use.

“When you look up the document, you’ll see that it’s named according to the document number, the year and ‘Proposition 58.’ Now, the reason we do this—and this is just our business process—is to get to a point that whenever you type in a document APN, that eight-digit number will get every associated document that comes up with it, including a Prop 58. Some people say, ‘Why are you putting the name in again?’ Well, that’s why we do it,” says Filippi, adding, “Whatever fields you have, you can include up here. But this Division, in this document type-case, has decided only to put document number, year and the name.”

11. Can’t find something? Check the folder path.

When a file can’t be found, Filippi says check the ‘Properties’ column, a “one-stop shop for diagnosing problems,” as he calls it. “If you can’t find your document when you scan or capture, this ‘Properties’ tab on the right is the first place you should look. Most of the time, the folder path is wrong.”

12. Use Zone OCR to extract data from a specific area of a document.

Zone OCR is what allows ASR to pull data from a specific area of a document type, in this case the assessor’s parcel number (APN). Filippi says there was “some trial and error involved initially” with how big an area to OCR, eventually reducing the zone from the entire document to just the APN. The Department has since reduced its error rate from 20% to about 3%. “So if you know that your critical data is always going to be in one area of a given document, then I would suggest you maximize that ability,” he says. “Our clerical staff doesn’t have to key this information.”

Filippi points to this as another example of how Quick Fields is “really well thought out from a user perspective—you can tell it which pages to OCR. Again, it all depends on how you want it to work to suit your processes in-house. The critical components of the software have been really well thought out. But, you’ve got enough options to really make it your own. And that’s why it’s really been so huge for us here!”

When Eastmont Towers’ Health Care Administrator Beth Nelsen RN, CHPN, began exploring enterprise content management systems, she soon discovered that “paperless” meant a lot more than just empty file cabinets. “First, we looked at outsourcing to a company that would scan our records onto disks,” remembers Nelsen, “but we were concerned about how we’d be able to use the information once it was digitally stored.”

Not to mention, outsourcing may have gotten rid of the paper—but it created an entirely new set of compliance concerns. Nelsen next began to explore solutions the agency could configure, use and administer in-house.

Quick Fields and Workflow: impressive possibilities

Kathy Gentile of Laserfiche reseller Bishop Business Equipment had worked with Eastmont Towers as an MFP hardware provider. Gentile, Bishop’s Laserfiche Document Management Specialist, invited Records Management staff from the agency to attend a workshop to see Laserfiche in action. Nelsen and her staff saw how Laserfiche Quick Fields could create files on the fly. Once files were created, Workflow could then notify decision makers of pending approvals and track those approvals throughout multiple business processes.

Nelsen was impressed. “We fell in love with Workflow,” she says, citing how it could help the agency:

• Transmit insurance information to the billing office.
• Send lab results to physicians.
• Route medication orders to the pharmacy.

“We’re a multidisciplinary team caring for people across a continuum, so that ability to share documents between departments, reduce paperwork and improve communication would greatly increase efficiency and positively impact patient care,” she adds.

Thus inspired, Nelsen and her team purchased a 30-user Laserfiche Rio pilot system and have spent the first half of this year preparing to roll it out. “Laserfiche Rio made the most sense in terms of meeting our immediate needs. It includes Workflow and the Records Management component to work with our EMR, as well as unlimited servers.

“As we progress, we can just add users to grow the system to meet our future needs and goals. Scalability was a big factor in choosing Laserfiche Rio,” Nelsen explains.

Goodbye filing cabinets, hello automated patient charting

Eastmont Towers’ medical records staff is now halfway through a backlog conversion process that Nelsen anticipates will eliminate at least four filing cabinets by the end of the year. Meanwhile, Nelsen and her staff have been analyzing business processes to guide the upcoming implementation. “After we had our initial training, we sat down to map out what exactly we do with our documents, where they are sent and why,” she says.

Initial focus has been on automating the patient charting process to compile and distribute client records and information as they enter Eastmont Towers from hospitals and other healthcare agencies. “We have several departments we need to route various information to, so we needed a way to streamline and simplify everything coming in and have it work with our EMR so staff could find everything in one place,” explains Nelsen.

Eastmont Towers is currently working with Gentile and Laserfiche consultants Our Support Services to automate and streamline the patient charting process:

• When a patient transfers to Eastmont’s Skilled Nursing facility, Quick Fields generates a chart by recognizing document types from an Excel spreadsheet.
• Quick Fields then populates metadata template fields according to patient name and ID number.
• Quick Fields then builds the folder structure out according to what documents fall under respective chart headings.
• Workflow then notifies the pharmacy and dietician according to document type (nutrition information, etc.).

Prior to implementing Laserfiche, paper files all had chart tab dividers. Every time a document was added to that tab, all documents had to be removed from the file so new information could be filed in the appropriate spot, then documents would be replaced in the folder and the folder refiled. A new feature in Laserfiche 8.2, dynamic fields, greatly simplifies this process, Gentile explains.

“When a ‘tab’ item is selected from the ‘Chart Tab’ field drop down, the ‘Chart Doc Type’ drop down list automatically populates to correspond with the documents that fall under that ‘Chart Tab’ category,” she says. “It’s saved staff a lot of time.”

Immediate practicalities, limitless possibilities

As Nelsen and her team continue to come up with ideas for future process automation, she sees even more potential for Laserfiche. “We wanted something that was would be fairly easy for the end user to learn but that also could streamline our processes better, and Laserfiche has met and exceeded our expectations,” she says.

Next up, she says, are integrations with the agency’s Keane clinical and financial software to support current EMR deployment and refine and automate processes in the Accounting Department. “We see a lot of value in having an ECM system that’s flexible and adaptable enough to meet clinical and non-clinical needs throughout our agency,” Nelsen adds.

“We have a lot of time and resources invested in our existing technology, so it’s important that Laserfiche enables us to build on the progress we’ve already made without interrupting the ways we’re used to working. Plus, the way Rio’s set up, we can keep building with it, which is very appealing to us. Technology’s always changing and Laserfiche is a great tool to adapt along with it.”

Screenshot of Eastmont Towers' table used to populate the template's dynamic fields by chart type.

The drop-down menu where users select Chart Doc Type to automatically populate the list with specific documents, instead of having to manually sort through tab dividers to find the paper file.

This Webinar also covers Quick Fields demonstrations and some of the available add-ons, as well as the benefits of the Laserfiche Certified Professional Program (CPP). Register for the Webinar now to learn more and to take advantage of this free offer!

Implementing ahead of inclement weather

Meyer says the move toward ECM was a proactive one. “For us, it was the general idea that we could increase efficiency by saving time and money while continuing to improve client service that first got us interested in an ECM. Also, the disaster recovery aspect really attracted us.”

As both an advisor and the firm’s IT Manager, Meyer brought a unique perspective to the search for an ECM. “Naturally, being in the financial services industry, auditing, security and compliance were simply ‘must haves.’ After that, flexibility and scalability were important to us in an ECM—we wanted a system that could grow with us over time as our business evolved,” he says.

The firm looked at several ECM solutions, including cloud-based options, before deciding on Laserfiche. “Laserfiche was the most feature-rich of the solutions we looked at in terms of the comprehensive functionality it offered,” he recalls. “Quick Fields, Bar Code Plug-In, Zone OCR, Audit Trail, Workflow—these were all appealing because they either directly or indirectly addressed our ‘must haves,’” he says. At the same time, Meyer continues, Laserfiche would improve day-to-day operations. “We wanted to reduce costs, and we found from talking to other firms using Laserfiche and reading about the software that, first, Laserfiche saves time—employees spend less time searching for documents. Second, it saves on paper and printing costs; and third, it saves on storage costs of client files and other documents.”

Last, but not least, Meyer adds, Laserfiche is a name synonymous with ECM in the financial services industry. “Having a tried-and-true, trusted name in document management was important to us as well,” he says. “The system was already approved by our broker dealer, Commonwealth Financial Network, which was also a plus.”

Laserfiche’s impact was felt not long after implementation. “The savings in time and paper realized after just one quarter was significant,” Meyer recalls. “We used to scan a copy of each quarterly report to a PDF using a multi-function copy machine (MFP). Someone would have to manually rename and file each report. At that time, we also kept a duplicate copy on file. Using Quick Fields and the Bar Code Plug-In, we were able to scan all of our reports and have them renamed and filed instantly. We also eliminated the need to keep a physical copy.”

Soon, hundreds of client files dating back to 1985 were scanned into Laserfiche, eliminating the need for several bookshelves and filing cabinets. While Meyer admits it was “a paradigm shift” for some employees to move from a paper-based system to a paperless one, after they experienced how they could literally file things automatically and then find them instantly, they embraced the concept completely. The transition brought peace of mind—and cost savings.

“There’s a reassurance in knowing that all of our important documents are stored electronically and backed up off-site, ensuring access to the data even if something were to happen to our office,” Meyer says, adding, “employees now have the option of accessing documents remotely [over Fure’s secured network], so they can work from anywhere.”

A key component to true enterprise consolidation of the firm’s information was working with reseller Cities Digital to integrate Laserfiche with CRM solution Junxure. “Before Laserfiche, we used to have some digital files in the CRM, some paper documents in a large client file and some documents in different filing cabinets; it was very disjointed,” he recalls. “Now, with the two systems integrated, we have one centralized location for statements, account paperwork, estate plans, correspondence and all relevant material related to a client.”

Automating compliance with Workflow

In addition, Laserfiche Workflow automates several business processes—chief among them logging client letters for compliance review. “We no longer need to make copies, depend on a person to manually log each letter, compile all letters into a binder for review and signatures or fax the letters every week,” Meyer says of the familiar process. “We used to create three copies of every single client letter we sent out. Now, we simply scan one copy right at our MFP, which Laserfiche Import Agent OCRs and applies metadata to before moving it into Laserfiche.”

Then, Workflow renames the document and applies the correct metadata by referencing Fure’s Junxure SQL database. The document is then routed to the correct folders automatically, which a Fure senior advisor is then able to review and sign—all electronically. “Once the workflow is completed, it even e-mails the signed document to Commonwealth’s compliance department,” Meyer adds. “Import Agent and Workflow, with some custom scripts built by Cities Digital and an electronic signature pad, have taken that process completely paperless with one touch of the button on our MFP.”

Audit preparation has likewise benefitted from the centralization and automation—utilizing functionality as simple as a robust search and as comprehensive as Audit Trail. “Laserfiche allows us to pull the necessary documents together for an auditor extremely quickly instead of going through file cabinets,” Meyer says. “The security and auditing of documents is also important as we are able to prove the integrity of our documents; any activity or change with a document is right there.”

The Laserfiche advantage: weather-proofed is ‘future-proofed’

For a family-oriented firm like Fure, the little improvements add up as well. “We can train new hires much more quickly—the system is that intuitive. We’re not having to give tours of file drawers or a bank of cabinets anymore.”

Meyer says he can recommend Laserfiche on two levels: “From an IT standpoint, the program is very easy to administer, and the flexibility of Laserfiche and the highly customizable security options allowed me to tailor the program to fit our needs as far as setting up template fields, adding users and ensuring compliance,” he says. “From a user standpoint, Laserfiche allows our financial planning team to access client documents and pinpoint what we need, when we need it, which translates into more time spent with clients and generating revenue and less time on tracking things down. That’s the real benefit—the reclaimed time and effort.”

Still, for all the operational benefits he can identify, Meyer credits the long-term value of Laserfiche to fitting so well with the firm’s holistic business philosophy. “Having a powerful ECM system like Laserfiche allows our business to adjust to the changing environment that many small businesses in any industry face,” he says.

“The more agile and flexible your technology system can be, the more ‘future-proofed’ you can become,” Meyer adds. “While it’s very hard to predict exactly where compliance, government regulations, clients’ needs and technology will be in the future, Laserfiche allows us to prepare as much as possible. Staying on course, no matter which way the wind blows, means having to adapt as conditions change without compromising on the final destination.”

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Before then, IT Director Lewis Paskin recalls PBC’s paper-based processes becoming overly cumbersome as the company grew, while escalating costs were adversely affecting profitability. There were shipping costs to receive charts; clerical costs to collate charts; and labor costs to copy, sort, log and distribute charts for coding, data entry and accounts receivable. “Adding to the paper overload were insurance claims that resulted in inbound Explanation of Benefits [EOB], patient payments, receipts, checks and correspondence—all of which needed to be opened, logged, accounted for and dispensed with daily,” Paskin says. “There were also significant paper costs from producing coding sheets for charts, making multiple copies of EOBs and eventually the long term offsite storage costs, as well as the HIPAA concerns that come with having all this copied and ‘travelling’ paper.”

Paskin led an internal committee to assess PBC’s needs in an enterprise content management (ECM) solution and began to search around four key features:

• Security.
• Accessibility.
• Accountability.
• Simplicity of user interface.

“We needed to make sure that billing records were easily retrievable, that protected health information was secure and that we could account for all our documents,” Paskin explains. “But we also needed a solution that was cost-effective and scalable. Our immediate goal was to be able to store billing records electronically, but our long term goal was a completely paperless workflow.”

Finding an ECM solution that fit—and would keep on fitting

PBC’s search soon took them to Laserfiche, and specifically to Laserfiche reseller JPI Data Resource. Paskin, for one, was initially skeptical. “When they said Laserfiche could dynamically create folders and structures as well as automatically extract text from documents, I told them I’d be shocked if it could. But it did,” he laughs.

“The Laserfiche product fulfilled our requirements,” Paskin continues, “but it was how it did it—the fact that it was really simple but also very powerful in terms of processing information—that’s how we knew it made sense for us. We have some of the least technical and most technical people working with our information, sometimes in a similar capacity. So, seeing how a staff member could just drop a document in a scanner and how Quick Fields automatically pulls and files all the metadata, or how Workflow would mean our users wouldn’t have to leave their desks, this was functionality we’d see improvements with immediately.”

Working with JPI’s Joseph Gutierrez, Paskin and his PBC team designed a 20-user Laserfiche system including Audit Trail; Workflow and Quick Fields; Bar Code and Zone OCR; Scan Connect and Snapshot for capture; and set up five different scanning stations. Installation, Paskin notes, was completed in less than a day, while user training took less than three days.

Paskin credits the comprehensive capture methods with making the transition to an automated environment a smooth one. “We’ve found that working with whatever file format a hospital is using with minimal modification is our best way to retrieve data,” Paskin says. “We do a lot of scanning directly into Laserfiche from our hospital clients’ facilities, which makes for a wide differential in chart documents. Some hospitals send charts with barcodes, others use file names, some just send text, but through the various Laserfiche applications we ferret out a way to get the data into the system.”

The biggest improvement, he notes, has been in processing paper. “Staff now simply scan those documents, either separated by bar-coded index sheets or by utilizing Zone OCR, into Laserfiche. Quick Fields reads the patient’s name and ID from the bar codes and automatically indexes the scanned files and fills in all the necessary document metadata.”

The effect was as impressive as it was immediate. “We were able to migrate one of our largest volume clients to a completely paperless environment in less than a week. Then we started bringing our other client applications online,” Paskin says.

Scanning volume soon hit 50,000 pages a day. “We scanned over 200,000 documents containing over 2.5 million pages in just under one year,” he adds.

The process(es) of coding and billing, better and more efficiently

The impact on PBC’s business processes was transformative:

• Laserfiche Import Agent constantly monitors the multiple directories PBC has set up to receive files.
• Laserfiche Quick Fields then extracts and sorts data, which triggers Workflow to route files to the respective departments that need to touch the document before it moves forward and is finally archived.
• If any predefined criterion is missing, Workflow automatically reroutes the record to the appropriate department for further follow up.

Previously, PBC’s coders signed out up to three days’ worth of charts and held them at their desks until coding was completed. Charts were then passed in bulk to the insurance review department, then on to data entry for manual entry to initiate billing before eventually being archived in a file room and sent to an offsite storage facility. Now, PBC coders work and code offsite, accessing information over a secure connection to PBC’s terminal servers.

“An entire team of people no longer need to work in the office—everything’s accessed and managed centrally through Laserfiche,” adds Paskin. As the coders finish a chart, it automatically moves through the workflow to the next department, speeding up and evening out the process from inbound chart to billing.

“We have over 10 different client applications that reside in Laserfiche—five of which are hospital-related, and three that are used by our Accounts Receivable (AR) department to look up claim denials, track work batches and store EOBs. We’re using it in more than five distinct departments including coding, claims processing, AR, finance and Human Resources; it’s our document management back-end for all our lines of business,” Paskin says.

This centralized control has improved oversight to monitor productivity as well as to ensure HIPAA compliance. Using Audit Trail, a document ID number can trace the file’s history. “We can see who changed what—and when—for every document,” says Paskin.

Another benefit, Paskin adds, is the ability to use SAP Crystal Reports tools to help monitor PBC’s workflow. “We have about 15–20 reports that go out daily—one of which is referred to as our ‘bucket report.’ When we receive a medical chart, getting it coded and billed quickly is key to cash flow. The bucket reports tell us how many charts are sitting in a user’s folder. Because all this data is in a single, centralized repository, it’s easy to create reports,” says Paskin. “I credit Joe and JPI with understanding our business well enough to show us how we should have our information structured.”

Automating the billing process itself, Paskin notes, “works essentially the same way it does in the Laserfiche brochure that JPI showed us initially. Again, everything’s in a single and straightforward database. We simply wrote Java and Web-related scripts to pull the account number, CPT and diagnosis codes to automate the actual billing process. Of course, there was controlled testing for about two weeks before we went live, but that was it.”

Now, PBC’s business processes are synonymous with Laserfiche—and significantly improved. Paskin points to processing the hundreds of charts sent to PBC on any given day. “That used to take three employees a full day to process manually; now it takes one person about 15 minutes.

“Our original vision was a paperless workflow, and we’ve pretty much achieved that. We have over 800,000 documents representing 10 million pages, and that all happened within the past 2 ½ years,” he adds. “We have redeployed 60% of our FTE’s required to produce a claim, and no longer need a night shift to keep up with the workload. Considering how far we’ve come, it’s pretty amazing.”

For more information, read Laserfiche’s ECM for Third Party Medical Billing brochure.

Read more about PBC.

• Municipio de Monterrey: Expert Data expanded the city’s 15-user Avante system by implementing Quick Fields, Workflow, Audit Trail and Web Access to automate check and invoice processing in its Accounting Department.
• Grupo Materias Primas: This leading manufacturer of ceramic minerals chose Laserfiche over a competing Docuware solution because of Quick Fields Real Time Look-up’s ability to access a third-party database to meet compliance and functionality requirements.
• Grupo Agora: Expert Data closed a 15-user Avante deal with this prominent construction firm by developing an integration with its contract management software, and is now utilizing Web Access to deploy the system remotely.

According to Gasi Fayad, CEO of Expert Data, this recent pattern of success has been the result of embracing a consultative sales strategy that emphasized solutions, not products. “By focusing extensively on discovery and needs assessment, we’ve been able to tailor our demos in such a way to show that Laserfiche is a comprehensive answer to the problems a prospective client is facing,” he says.

“At the same time, we’ve been able to create a lot of opportunity, both with new and existing clients, to determine where Laserfiche can be more actively deployed to enhance and streamline business processes, and that’s also proven quite successful,” Fayad adds.

By 2007, CapitalCare’s decade of growth had the side effect of generating more paperwork than the group’s 14 offices could efficiently manage—at least not the way they had been. “We were on our fourth expansion in our central office building in Albany; our offices were running out of storage and our CBO had rooms of files and boxes everywhere. So we asked ourselves, ‘Why all this space for storage? Why all this time to find things?’” says Charles Hagstrand, CIO of CapitalCare. “After 10 years, we needed a solution to move us forward.”

Hagstrand envisioned a true enterprise content management (ECM) solution from the start, one that could manage CapitalCare’s spectrum of information needs, including 700,000 patient encounters a year being stored remotely to over 280,000 EOB documents generated annually, as well as other documents and business records associated with its various practices. Eventually shared back-office business processes would be automated, beginning with AP processing.

“Initially we looked at a lot of vendors who had products that handled specific document types, but we were looking for something that wouldn’t pigeonhole us,” recalls Hagstrand. “You see a lot of departmental applications in larger organizations. We wanted a single system that could fit a variety of needs in different departments, and that ultimately could grow with us.”Hagstrand found what CapitalCare was looking for when his evaluation team discovered Laserfiche through reseller JPI Data Resource. “It was the product’s versatility that really won us over,” he says. “We liked that Workflow was a push technology that could keep things moving more effectively.”

Adds Jason Wicks, business analyst, “Laserfiche was like one-stop shopping as far as addressing the range of projects we were looking at, from HR files to Accounting and through-processing contracts and invoices. It’s very flexible.”

Wicks worked with JPI and CapitalCare department heads to design and deploy a pilot 20-user Laserfiche system with Records Management Edition (RME) and Workflow. They mapped out a multi-phase implementation that would eventually include using RME to automate retention and compliance, as well as Workflow to route invoices from CapitalCare’s central business offices in Albany to the group’s various remote locations for AP processing.

The first order of business was addressing Hagstrand’s storage and access concerns. “We took the approach that we should start by working with the items that didn’t involve Workflow first,” Wicks says.

Implementation began with backlog conversion of a decade’s worth of historical files in the HR and Medical Management departments, “just taking paper and getting it in Laserfiche to get people used to archiving,” as Wicks puts it.

The impact was immediate. “Our first touch is our site managers who are working with our patient encounters—that totals over 700,000 documents a year,” Wicks explains. “We used to have to process those in our central business office, then send them back out to the sites to store for seven years. Now they’re all inputted when received from the site and accessed as needed through Laserfiche.”

Standardizing to streamline AP processing

The next phase of implementation deployed Workflow to help automate AP processing for CapitalCare’s accounting department—which has seen the number of sites it supports grow from 14 to 27 in the four years since Laserfiche was acquired in 2007.

“Before Laserfiche, AP processing wasn’t very efficient, nor was there a common practice for approving invoices,” Wicks explains. “Some bills were received at the site, approved and forwarded; others came to the CBO and were distributed for approval and return. Laserfiche allowed us to standardize the process, and that’s been a big time saver.”

Thanks to Laserfiche, turnaround time for AP processing was reduced from 7–10 days to 2–3:

• Invoices are now captured and sorted centrally using Quick Fields in CapitalCare’s Albany office.
• Workflow then automatically routes the invoices to the appropriate site managers, who are notified through email that they have a document to approve with a shortcut link to retrieve the document.
• Working in conjunction with a custom file export tool developed by JPI, approved documents are then automatically pushed from Laserfiche to CapitalCare’s Great Plains accounting system via QuickLinks and PaperSave.

“Accounting now knows what documents need approval and which documents are in a queue once the site has approved the document,” Wicks says. A backup copy of the exported document is created using Workflow, which, after 30 days, is automatically deleted by a Workflow activity.

The next phase, Wicks adds, will be to establish a centralized shared service center, where invoices will be processed directly from the central business office. “Workflow will set up queues for each of our sites’ accounting departments to process invoices,” he says.

An overall benefit, Wicks says, has come from the time saved making action items more available to site staff. “Although we have a separate solution to store patient medical information for continuity, middle management at each site—typically one or two employees—utilizes Laserfiche to access past patient encounters, approving invoices and coding corrections, and this has eliminated a lot of lag time.”

The future of the future: Workflow

Future projects are already slated—including implementing RME. “The functionality of Records Management Edition will assist with purging documents once they have reached their shelf life, while Audit Trail will help keep us in compliance,” Wicks says.

Hagstrand says even the IS Department has its own ideas for how to utilize the system. “We’re actually hoping to use Laserfiche to manage our service agreements, so we’ll be able to run queries and see what’s going to expire in the next year.”

“The system keeps evolving as we bring on more documents and processes,” add Wicks, pointing out that Workflow will play a more leading role in future deployment. “I’d say we’re at the grassroots of pushing information between sites and departments. Right now, I’m looking at any situation where we have an opportunity to push documents and how we can utilize Laserfiche to automate additional functions between our practices and our central business office,” he continues, noting a recent meeting with a business unit to discuss improving billing and coding through automation. “Workflow has really worked out for us because we can take the visual process of scanning documents and apply that to designing workflows—it’s very intuitive.”

This versatility, says Wicks, is why Laserfiche use continues to evolve. That, and Wicks makes sure CapitalCare’s 50 named users know just what’s possible using the system that solved their initial storage problems.

Says Wicks, “We need to do more education within the company to say ‘This is a lot more than just a scanning solution’ and hold a ‘Did you know?’ session.”

The current schedule is as follows, though more regional training sessions will be added:

• Long Beach, CA: April 12–15
• Seattle, WA: May 17–20
• Richmond, VA: June 7–10
• New Orleans, LA: July 12–15
• Minneapolis, MN: September 13–16
• Denver, CO: October 4–7

Day One – User Workshop: Each workshop kicks off with a free, one-day workshop that includes the most popular presentations and demos from January’s Laserfiche Institute Conference, as well as case study success stories from local Laserfiche Users.

Day Two – Using Laserfiche: Designed for beginning and intermediate users, this course ($350) teaches attendees how to effectively index, file and retrieve documents; use the scanning interface and image clean-up tools; design templates; and use Laserfiche Snapshot.

Day Three – Administering Laserfiche: Designed for intermediate to advanced users and administrators, this course ($450) covers all of the topics tested in the Laserfiche Administrator I Certification Exam, including: designing and managing metadata; administering Laserfiche Volumes; designing a security policy; implementing a backup plan; and troubleshooting the system.

Training sessions also include an optional fourth day of workshops for those interested in more advanced training in areas such as Implementing Laserfiche Workflow 8 and Implementing Laserfiche Quick Fields 8.

Check the Laserfiche community Website for additional offerings, including certification options through the Laserfiche Certified Professional Program. Attendees may register for any and/or all days of the training workshops.

Register today!

“We were about to cross the $25,000,000 AUM threshold for SEC registration. With that milestone also came the millstone of an SEC audit sometime during that first year of registration,” says Margaret Hubbard, CPA.

The firm identified a link between compliance and operational efficiency, and outlined their requirements accordingly:

1. SEC compliance proof.
2. Easy access to files.
3. Managing the sheer weight and volume of records even as a small firm.

The answer came later that year at a TD Ameritrade Institutional Conference Hubbard attended.

“Speakers there were talking about an industry-wide need for electronic document management and it rang true with us, both in terms of operational efficiency as well as simplifying compliance,” Hubbard recalls. Researching what other firms were using led Hubbard to Laserfiche. “We wanted a large, reputable solution provider with a lot of experience and excellent references,” she explains. “The biggest draw was that the U.S. government was using Laserfiche.”

Implementation took place over two days in late 2005. With five years of confirmations, monthly brokerage reports, forms and correspondence to input, as well as current paper-based processes to streamline, EMM looked to Laserfiche Quick Fields, especially its zone optical character recognition (Zone OCR) tools, to automate the capture process. Laserfiche installation was completed in a day, while fine-tuning the Quick Fields capture process took another day. “The operational improvement was immediate,” says Hubbard.

“Quick Fields became our file clerk”

“We had been manually filing every confirmation as it arrived by mail. After installing Laserfiche, we had the brokerage houses switch us to electronic delivery. Quick Fields became our file clerk,” says Hubbard.

EMM now receives a monthly download of client statements from its brokerage houses, which Quick Fields reads, processes and imports into each client’s Laserfiche file. “We used to get a heavy package by mail much later in the month than the current downloads are available. That took time and resources to sort through and file. If we ever needed to access a record, we had to locate the big fat file book by month, manually cross-index between alpha name and account number and then manually find the report by account number,” she explains.

“Now we get the information earlier, file it faster, find it instantly when needed, have a nice clear electronic copy if we need to print it out—which is rarely—and we don’t have to hurt ourselves moving all those bankers’ boxes.”

With Laserfiche now doing the heavy lifting, so to speak, the firm was able to use part-time help to complete backlog scanning and conversion of the five years’ worth of existing files over the course of the following year. That first year also marked another milestone/millstone: the first SEC audit of the newly-registered firm. Before Laserfiche, the process would have involved compiling paper files manually, taking staff time and resources that, to a small firm, significantly impact or distract from revenue-generating day-to-day operations.

With Laserfiche, Hubbard says, preparation was as simple as using the system’s comprehensive search functionality to respond to the auditor. “Our original need was really to successfully complete the SEC audit process, and that was more than met within a year of implementation when we had a very clean audit,” she says. “The auditor only stayed onsite half a day because we were able to almost instantly hand her everything she requested. We were able to clearly demonstrate our compliance with all regulations. Laserfiche was essential to that demonstration.”

Hubbard says the firm is encouraged with the improvements to both its day-to-day operations as well as the relative ease with which it proves compliance. EMM is now planning to implement a new CRM system (likely Junxure, according to Hubbard) in the second quarter of this year. A major selection consideration is the ease with which the chosen CRM system integrates with Laserfiche. “We’ve been consulting with Laserfiche and our reseller [Bits and Bytes Document Solutions of Dacula, GA] to help with our selection to make sure it integrates with our existing applications including our portfolio management software, Schwab Performance Technologies® PortfolioCenter®, and Microsoft® Outlook®.”

Proving the wisdom of implementing proven technology

Hubbard admits that the firm’s steps toward more automated business processes have belied a conservative approach to technology. But, she says, that’s all the part of the long-term vision: to be innovative—just with proven innovations.

“We seek to be second-generation adopters in terms of determining the best technology we need for our next level of growth,” she says. “We want solutions others have tested through trial and error so we don’t have to. None of us in our firm are techies, so we’ve learned we get more out of technology by working with proven solutions.”

The way Hubbard sees it, Laserfiche provides a modest-sized firm like EMM with the best of both worlds: industry-recognized success with the scalability to do more as the need arises and uses evolve. “Laserfiche has provided more power than we have been able to harness, and that’s exactly where we want to be. We discover more uses for the system monthly, and we’re confident that Laserfiche can more than keep up with our needs as we keep growing.”

• Copying and filing checks, purchase orders and invoices.
• Filing bank and vendor reconciliations and journal entries.
• Answering daily open records requests from vendors and departments district-wide.
• Making records available for auditors from internal, local and state agencies.

By 2008, file cabinets were taking up more and more space—and staff trips to look up records were taking up more and more staff time. Sheryl Davis, Superintendent for Business and Support Services, decided to do something about it. Davis had seen how different document types could be scanned, sorted, indexed and filed according to a customizable set of template fields using Laserfiche at a workshop held at the Region 12 Education Service Center (ESC Region 12). ESC Region 12 held the workshop in conjuction with their Laserfiche reseller, Bryan/College Station-based SMARTfiles, to introduce Laserfiche and its benefits for ISDs.

Davis was encouraged by the fact that ESC Region 12 (which serves WISD) was already successfully utilizing Laserfiche, and contacted SMARTfiles about acquiring a similar system in the WISD Accounting Department.

A scan in time saves nine

Initial implementation focused on automating how AP staff captured vendor information, and key to that was integrating Laserfiche with the District’s SunGard e-Finance software (formerly Pentamation). Utilizing Laserfiche Quick Fields advanced capture software, staff could now schedule regular processing sessions to automatically create Laserfiche files using the purchase order (PO) numbers, which then automatically fill-in vendor information from the SunGard system. The efficiency, says Cindy Shaver, Accounting and Payroll Coordinator, was immediate. “It saves us time because we don’t have to scan in the POs and create a file,” she says. Then, after paying the invoice, the scanned check and other supporting documentation are likewise added to the file—which is all accessible from a desktop.

WISD found that user adoption is not without its hiccups—or its remedies. “We had an employee that did not want to scan at first, as she thought it would consume her time,” Shaver recalls. “Once she saw the value in retrieving documents at her desktop and not having to retrieve them from a file cabinet and/or boxes from off-site, she became more willing to scan.”

Shaver admits she herself took a little time acclimating to the idea of paperless information automation. “When I first came on two years ago, I thought we’d need to create a full-time position to scan in all these documents, but that hasn’t been the case,” she says. After every check-run, the Accounts Payable Specialist scans in the checks and supporting documentation by PO, adding them to the file already created in Laserfiche. “It takes some time and monitoring to ensure that items are being scanned in weekly, but the result is this overall efficiency,” she says. “It’s absolutely wonderful to have this information on our computers versus going to a file cabinet, or a person’s office, or finding a missing document.”

The scanning process itself benefitted from some refinements. Initially, Shaver says, staff scanned in by invoice. “But one check could pay 30 invoices, which took time. So we reevaluated the process and started scanning by POs.” Now, almost three years later, the department has seen consistent long-term benefits. “We are able to retrieve documents quickly and are able to move files off-site sooner, which has freed up space in our department.”

As a principal end-user, AP Lead Gloriana Murry credits a short but optimistic learning curve with contributing to both the success of initial adoption, and leading to a broader scope of Laserfiche use. “It’s a very easy-to-use system,” she says. “It didn’t take much to open my eyes to what else we could use the system for.”

WISD’s Laserfiche reseller, SMARTfiles, intially provided staff with an eight-hour training session, followed by annual refresher courses. In addition, monthly newsletters and tips-and-tricks e-mails keep users up-to-date with new ways to increase efficiency. Staff have also taken advantage of online training courses available through the Laserfiche Certified Professional Program to further increase their knowledge base.

Shaver credits the flexibility of Laserfiche to add and customize template fields with expanding its use for more detailed audit information and accounting functions, including journal entries, bank reconciliations and documents/reports for outside auditors. “I created a template for journal entries very easily. I simplified the template to include ‘Journal Entry Number,’ ‘Description,’ ‘Period’ and ‘Year,’” she says. “Since I’m scanning them in, I no longer have to keep an actual file folder for them.”

Paper-free means headache-free audits, records requests and reconciliation

The comprehensiveness and convenience of having vendor and other financial information in single, searchable repository has significantly impacted two major processes-slash-pains: answering open records requests and making information available to auditors. “Every day you’re bombarded with phone calls from people needing information from you,” says Murry. “In the past you had to get up and go to a file cabinet to look it up—if it was misfiled, you were on your own. Now I just save a copy to PDF and e-mail it off. It went from taking 15 minutes to less than two minutes. I’ll have campuses call and I’ll have them on the phone and say ‘Okay, it’s in your e-mail right now.’”

Shaver shares this story: “I had an open records request for all invoices that were paid to this one vendor for the last five years. For the first 2 ½ years—from before we implemented Laserfiche—for those, we had to track them down in off-site storage and then pay to have those files delivered. We then had to un-staple them and stand by the copier machine to make copies,” she says. “For the invoices from the 2 ½ years since Laserfiche was implemented, I searched by vendor, highlighted and saved it to a file and sent the file electronically, which saved paper, toner and valuable time.”

Between internal, local and state agencies, WISD’s financial records are subject to regular audits—at least 12 times a year—often without more than a few days lead time. “Our auditors usually provide us a list of maybe 200 invoices they wanted to review for testing purposes.” Shaver says. “We used to either pull the items for them or they would go through our files to pull it themselves. Now, I set them up with viewing-only access in Laserfiche, so they can review their selections in Laserfiche.

“They can also save paper by saving their selections to file versus printing as they, too, are trying to go paperless,” she adds. “I had one auditor comment how simple the process was for him to review and how much it sped up the process. Some of the auditors were fighting over the computer as we had stored all information for them in a special “Audit folder”—perhaps next year I will need to ensure they have another computer with Laserfiche so they don’t have to wait until the other auditor is finished with their testing.”

Another process that Shaver says significantly improved is reconciling the WISD fixed assets system with its SunGard system. “If there’s anything missing in our fixed asset program or SunGard, I just use Laserfiche to research the asset in question and make any corrections,” Shaver says. “It’s so easy, and I’m doing it from my desk.”

Now, she says, she can’t imagine life without Laserfiche. “If you take it away, it’s like you’re taking away my computer. It’s like going back to the Stone Age.”

Hello Payroll, goodbye nine filing cabinets

More recently, Shaver’s departmental duties have expanded to include the WISD Payroll Department—and all nine file cabinets worth of its personnel files. “One of the Account Payable Specialists was promoted to Payroll Specialist II position—she’s a strong advocate for Laserfiche and is looking forward to utilizing it for Payroll,” Shaver says. The department, she adds, is preparing to input personnel files into Laserfiche, including:

• Action sheets.
• Direct deposit forms.
• Payroll deduction forms.
• W-4 forms.

For her expanded duties, however, Shaver is already using Laserfiche. “Currently, I am scanning in all the payroll redistributions that I have prepared, because it enables me to keep track of the redistributions as well as to retrieve the documentation for the redistribution,” she says.

She says what has made Laserfiche so versatile for WISD has been its ease-of-use. “I’ve seen similar programs to Laserfiche, but nothing as simple to use,” Shaver offers. “We can set it up similarly to how we’re used to keeping out documents on our desktops.

“It’s so easy to use that when I joined the department as the system administrator, I picked it up right away. I think it says a lot about our success using Laserfiche that it is so easy and intuitive, because you can set it up however works best for you.”

A committee was promptly formed to review content management solutions. Ralph Stephens, Executive Director of Strategic Sourcing & General Services at TAMUK, knew that some of TAMUK’s sister schools had turned to Laserfiche with similar content management challenges.

In fact, nearly 1,200 staff in 10 different departments and divisions within The Texas A&M University System’s members were already benefitting from Laserfiche, including:

• Texas A&M University at Corpus Christi, to comply with records management retention schedules, improve document security and decrease the cost of handling paper.
• Texas A&M Health Sciences Center, to digitize all internal documents, reduce overnight shipping, eliminate office storage and improve document access and security.
• Texas A&M’s Department of Entomology, to securely store digitized documents, automate business processes and eliminate the need for file cabinets.

Stephens spoke with colleagues about the benefits of using Laserfiche and learned that Texas A&M AgriLife had also recently implemented Laserfiche to eliminate the need to print records and to automate document matching across 86 locations. The TAMUK committee contacted Laserfiche reseller SMARTfiles, which had worked with several TAMUS accounts, and arranged several demos to see how Laserfiche could fit their needs.

“So many records and copies were being created that security became an issue, especially for upper administration,” explains Vicki Bienski of SMARTfiles. “Sensitive information such as social security numbers and travel vouchers were being manually transported between offices.” Implementing Laserfiche would allow multiple departments to access and share information from a single, secured repository, rectifying confidentiality issues surrounding certain records while also allowing multiple departments to instantly access the information they needed.

The committee decided that Laserfiche was the right choice for TAMUK, with users across the board agreeing that the system was not only user-friendly, but also scalable enough to grow as needs changed. “Although we needed Laserfiche to solve our document storage issues, its breadth of capabilities also played a large part in our selection process,” explains Stephens.

Updating by Automating

Implementation began late that June and by the end of the summer, 15 employees in six departments were using the system, paving the way for campus-wide deployment that fall. Initially, the school chose administrative offices to serve as beta sites for developing procedures, testing processes and eventually training other departments to use the system. The beta sites included:

• Accounting.
• Accounts Payable.
• Budgets.
• Human Resources.
• Physical Plant.
• Procurement.

Once the beta sites proved successful, campus-wide deployment began. A significant part of this expanded deployment was to change the scope of Laserfiche use from archival storage to day-forward capture of active business documents, the idea being to input, organize and access old and new files across multiple departments, all from Laserfiche. “We liked that Laserfiche could be a repository for any document—image files, Word documents, PDFs, e-mails— not only scanned images,” Stephens says.

To automate such a high volume of document capture and processing, TAMUK turned to Laserfiche Quick Fields, which pulls data from incoming electronic documents, to automatically create, sort and file records in the Laserfiche repository. Managing certain business documents like purchase orders or payment vouchers, however, required a more elaborate solution.

Utilizing FabSoft Integration to Optimize Functionality

While Quick Fields could easily scan documents and file them appropriately from the university’s legacy system, those records were then sent to the University College Station remote mainframe, where information is electronically housed, before they were sent back to TAMUK and printed—up to a staggering 4,000 pages of vouchers and purchase orders a day. In order to eliminate both the need to print such a large volume of paper, as well as to eliminate the extra steps it took to input this paperwork and deliver it to the departments requesting it, TAMUK worked with Laserfiche engineers to integrate FabSoft with Quick Fields to create detailed electronic forms unique to the information at hand.

FabSoft places the print data from the mainframe system onto a new form, and that key information is extracted by Quick Fields, then organized and stored in the Laserfiche repository. From there, TAMUK departments selectively print only the purchase orders or vouchers they need, bypassing the remote mainframe. Response time to inquiries—both internal and external—has been greatly reduced. Multiple departments are able to access information simultaneously.

“We can quickly look up images of the purchase order or payment voucher and provide either copies or specific data elements in seconds rather than hours,” says Tina Livingston, Director of Budgets. “Previously, we had to go to file cabinets (sometimes in different offices), pull folders and make copies. Now, we look them up in Laserfiche and e-mail them to the customer.”

With such a successful integration of systems, Stephens says, “Several of the other A&M schools have expressed interested in following suit and implementing their own Laserfiche-FabSoft integration.”

Enterprise-Wide Results

Today, 200 users have access to Laserfiche, with approximately 45 users accessing the system on a daily basis—which is only 25% of TAMUK’s projected use. While TAMUK is saving on paper, labor, mailing and storage costs, the real benefit of using Laserfiche, Stephens says, has been in changing the mindset of TAMUK’s staff and administrators, inspiring the adoption of new ways of working.

“Laserfiche can do so much more than we first envisioned,” he says. “We’ve been able to expand it from a simple storage repository to a system that controls the workflow of our documents and maximizes efficiency.”

Though Laserfiche is now primarily used within Administrative Services and offices within departments, Stephens says that collaborative content management is the next phase—and TAMUK is looking to Laserfiche Workflow to drive it. “Workflow is going to be the real tool for efficiently managing documents between departments. It’s going to deliver huge benefits,” Stephens says. He predicts that TAMUK will see exponential growth in process change.

As for his take on the Laserfiche Run Smarter® Philosophy, Stephens offers this advice to new users: “For TAMUK, Laserfiche has been a business-process change agent—it showed us solutions to problems we hadn’t even considered before. Think of Laserfiche as an initiative, not just an application.”

• Westerville, OH, City Schools Treasurer’s Office. GFC leveraged Quick Fields and PDP partner Cambridge Connections’ Docs-on-the-Cloud to close this deal in less than two months.
• St. Charles, IL, Community School District. The reseller also closed this 30-user Avante deal (including a WebLink public portal) in less than two months.
• Trans International. GFC upgraded this Wisconsin logistics company to Rio so it could take advantage of unlimited servers to deploy customized workflows enterprise-wide.

According to Scott Martin, ECM Supervisor at GFC, the increase in sales is the direct result of a two-year-old training program for sales representatives focusing on broader solutions selling. “Our VP of Sales Kelly Moran and our Director of Professional Services Jeff Dotzler developed ‘the Unified Sales Process’ that focuses on 10 different competencies offered by GFC, and we’ve made sure ‘ECM’ is high on that list.”

He adds, “Our reps aren’t just talking about copiers, they’re talking about document management, content management and professional services. We’re able to go into an opportunity—even with a customer we’ve had a hardware relationship with for 20 years—and start asking questions in a way that establishes Laserfiche as a flagship application that’s going to positively impact their business.”

As a result, Martin says, GFC, a leading Canon distributor, has become more competitive as an ECM provider, winning RFPs with Laserfiche alone. “We had a small construction company in Ohio where we were up against another copier distributor. We didn’t win the hardware business, but our sales rep went back in and wound up selling an Avante system,” he says.

Martin is confident that similar opportunities will result in an exponential sales increase for ’11. “With an emphasis on ECM and professional services as part of our core sales methodology, we are on track to more than double our Laserfiche revenue this year.”

She ticks off a few of the benefits that give Laserfiche a leg up on the competition: “First, Laserfiche is easy to use, because it looks and functions like Windows and Google. Second, it’s stable and easy for the IT Department to maintain. Third, it has an open API that makes it easy to integrate with our other applications.”

These benefits, Duckett notes, are vital to Shakopee, which has a two-person IT Department supporting approximately 125 city staff in nine different departments. In fact, if Laserfiche wasn’t easy to use, maintain and integrate, the city wouldn’t have considered shaking up its approach to enterprise content management (ECM) by upgrading from four concurrent users to a 50-user Avante system.

Leading Up to the Upgrade

“We first implemented Laserfiche in 2005, using it to manage building permits through an integration with our PIMS building permit software,” Duckett explains, outlining how the process works:

- “We print barcoded permits that our records clerk scans into Laserfiche Quick Fields, which is an automated data capture solution.
- “Within Quick Fields we have an ODBC connection that connects to the PIMS database.
- “Quick Fields pattern matches the permit address, permit type and permit ID and automatically archives the document in the Laserfiche repository.”

She also notes that the city has long used Laserfiche to manage council agenda packets and other miscellaneous items, some of which are made available to the public through Laserfiche WebLink, a Web browser-based thin client that provides read-only access to public information.

The desire to upgrade the system came last year, when the Police Department hopped on the Laserfiche bandwagon. “In October 2010,” Duckett says, “the Police Department started using Laserfiche for evidence photos, and we integrated Laserfiche with New World, the PD’s case management system, to enable officers to automatically open photos that pertain to specific cases.”

The integration works as follows:

- Officers access an incident report in New World.
- By right-clicking on the New World screen, a box with a “Search Laserfiche” button pops up.
- Clicking the button launches Laserfiche and automatically takes the user directly to the right case folder, where he can view the evidence photos.

Jennifer Boudreau, Shakopee’s Police Records Technician, explains that one way the PD leverages the integration is to track graffiti, making it easier for officers to identify all instances of a tagger’s work so the city can recoup clean-up costs.

She also notes that Laserfiche allows officers to access photos in the field from their squad cars, which is something they couldn’t do in the past. “It’s an officer safety issue,” she says. “For example, if the officers come across a tagger with a known gang affiliation, they can treat that individual with more caution.”

Boudreau notes that in the past, search options were limited. With Laserfiche, officers can search photos by case number, but they can also search based on the metadata associated with each photo. This makes it easier to discern patterns that might not have otherwise been apparent.

Now that Shakopee has upgraded to Laserfiche Avante, the Police Department is looking forward to scanning all case files into the system. “Right now, case documents are contained in a paper file, which eliminates collaboration and the ability to work on the case at the same time as someone else,” says Boudreau. “As a result, we end up doing a lot of photocopying, which wastes paper. It can also get confusing to have so many copies of the same document floating around, because you never know which is the most current, complete version.”

Further, she explains that Laserfiche will be able to store more than copies of paper documents; where applicable, electronic case files will also contain audio files, squad car video and so on.

Since the Upgrade

Less than a month after implementing its 50-user Avante system, Shakopee has already brought the Finance Department onboard. It now uses Laserfiche Quick Fields to scan barcoded accounts payable documents into the repository, where they’re instantly searchable from the desktop.

“With the upgrade to Avante, which for us included the ‘Barcode and Validation’ and ‘Real Time Lookup and Validation’ packages, we can now use the pattern matching feature in Quick Fields, which automatically creates the folder structure in Laserfiche,” explains Duckett. “This creates a more efficient and seamless process for the users who scan documents into the system.”

She adds that once the Police Department starts using Laserfiche for its case files, it will use Quick Fields for its scanning, as well.

The next department to start using Laserfiche will likely be HR, which wants to use the system to digitize employee records and automate the hiring process using Laserfiche Workflow, a business process management tool that automatically performs specified actions (such as document routing) based on organizations’ unique business rules.

According to Duckett, this is just the beginning. “We hope to have every department using Laserfiche by this time next year.”

Additional Integrations

With the New World integration well underway, and the integration with the city’s PIMS building permit software already in place, Shakopee has big plans for linking Laserfiche to additional city applications. “Next, we plan to integrate Laserfiche with GeoLink, our GIS/mapping application,” says Duckett. “When you click on a land parcel, you’ll be able to launch Laserfiche and pull up all the documents associated with that particular piece of land.”

This functionality will be useful for multiple departments, including:

• The Police Department, which will use it for crime mapping.
• The Fire Department, which will be able to quickly retrieve building plans during emergencies.
• The Public Works Department, which will gain easy access to sewer information.

She goes on to explain that the city is also looking to integrate Laserfiche with JDE, Shakopee’s finance, payroll and HR software. “By integrating these two systems—and taking advantage of Laserfiche Workflow—we’ll be able to simplify the payment cycle with electronic invoices and purchase orders that can be automatically routed through the approval process. Once we digitize our HR records, we’ll be able to automate the hiring process as well.”

From Duckett’s perspective as an IT professional, the best thing about the planned integrations is how easy they’ll be to set up. “Because Laserfiche is used across so many cities and government entities, there are a lot of proven, pre-built integrations available to us at no additional cost.”

Avante = Affordability

In terms of cost-effectiveness, Duckett also appreciates how affordable it was to upgrade to Avante. “If we’d stayed with a concurrent user system and simply purchased the additional functionality and users we needed, it would have cost us $40,000 more than the upgrade to Avante,” she explains. “Plus, our named users now have 24/7 access to information, which is important from a productivity standpoint.”

She concludes, “Although it’s early in the implementation process, we’re starting to see financial and efficiency savings in the Finance, Building and Police Departments. Once we extend Laserfiche to all city departments and start creating workflows, we expect to save a lot more on paper and printing costs, and we also expect to greatly enhance employee efficiency.

“It’s our goal to have Laserfiche installed on every desktop in the city. We envision that it’ll be used as often as our e-mail client, providing instant access to records, streamlining business processes and allowing us to move data across multiple platforms.”

Sample images can be added to the Pre-Classification stage of processing and to each document class. In Pre-Classification, you can add one sample image since processes there run on every page. In the document classes, you can add multiple sample images since processes in Page Processing or Storage Processing can run on specified pages.

To add multiple sample images in a document class:

1. Select the name of a document class.
2. Select the Samples menu in the Image Toolbar.
3. Select View Sample Image Settings.
4. The Document Class Settings dialog box will open to the Sample Images tab.
5. You can import sample images from your computer or scan new ones. You can assign each image to a page. One image can be set as the default: this image will appear automatically when a process is selected, but you can still view and test processes on the other images as well.

Once you have multiple sample images, you can change which one appears in the Document Viewer.

To change the sample image:

1. Add more than one sample image, as described above.
2. Select the Samples menu in the Image Toolbar.
3. If the process is set to run on more than one page, you will be able to select the page number of a sample image.

Example: Mark has configured a Zone OCR process in Identification. He wants to check whether it will correctly identify only the pages he wants to become the first pages of new documents, and not similar pages that do not meet the criteria. He adds multiple sample images, one that meets the identification conditions and one that looks similar but should not be identified as a first page. He selects the Identification node. He tests the process on page 1, changes the sample image and tests again on page 2.

“Technical innovation and efficiency are important to our citizens,” says Steve Barden, Systems Development Supervisor for Durham County, “and they’re a top priority for the IT Department as well.”

Over the past year and a half, one of the major strategic projects for Durham County’s IT Department has been upgrading and standardizing its enterprise content management (ECM) infrastructure. “In the past, ECM was viewed as a departmental application,” explains Barden. “We came to realize, however, that this is an inefficient and resource-intensive approach, so I stepped in as project manager to coordinate the various installations and get everyone on the same page.”

With Laserfiche already in place in four county departments, the choice of systems upon which to standardize was simple.

“We have 32 different departments across the county,” says Barden. “DSS, HR, Public Health and Legal were already using Laserfiche, so it made sense to stick with the system they were already familiar with. It was more a question of getting them all onto the same version of Laserfiche before rolling it out to additional departments like IT and Purchasing.”

Laserfiche Rio, with its unlimited servers and ability to give IT central control over the system while still allowing each department to customize it to their own unique needs, made the most sense from an enterprise standpoint. Today, Durham County has a 605-user Rio system, along with Quick Fields and Laserfiche Records Management Edition.

In the Beginning

Durham County’s first purchase of Laserfiche occurred back in 2006, when DSS decided that case management would be easier if files could be saved in an electronic, rather than a paper, format. To date, DSS has scanned and stored the following records in Laserfiche:

• Case files.
• Food & Nutrition Services.
• Child Welfare.

In addition, it’s currently about halfway through the conversion of its Medicaid records. “DSS will be moving into the county’s new Human Services Building at the end of 2012, and our goal is to be completely paperless by then,” explains Sharon Hirsch, Assistant Director of Customer Accountability for Durham County’s DSS Department. “It’ll make the move a lot easier,” she adds, “and there’s also no room in the new building for document storage, so that’s extra incentive to make sure all our records are accessible on the desktop.”

In fact, accessibility is Hirsch’s favorite thing about Laserfiche. “In the past, staff members had to request paper records from the Records Management team, and it sometimes took them a few days to deliver the requested documentation. Today, our staff has immediate, point-and-click access to the records they need. It’s a huge time saver.”

Hirsch also notes that it’s easier for supervisors to review active case files thanks to Laserfiche. “Active files used to be locked up in file cabinets by individual case workers. Laserfiche gives the supervisors greater visibility into work as it’s being done, so they’re able to correct any errors or oversights earlier in the process.”

Seeing the success DSS was having with Laserfiche, the HR, Public Health and Legal Departments soon implemented the system for themselves.

Branching Out

…into Legal

According to Nina Bullock, Administrative Assistant to the County Attorney, the Legal Department was tired of making multiple copies of documents like medical records and transcripts, which could number thousands of pages. “It was a constant strain on both material and staff resources,” she says.

The Laserfiche implementation has been particularly useful for the Legal Department in regard to document duplication and distribution. “Instead of copying and couriering documents to interested parties, we’re now able to e-mail them or send the documents on a CD.”

Additionally, the county’s lawyers no longer have to drag boxes of paper into court. Instead, they simply bring their laptops and access documents through Laserfiche. “Because staff no longer has to transport heavy files to court or move heavy boxes to retrieve closed files, the risk for injuries, particularly back injuries, has been greatly reduced,” says Bullock. “Back injuries are the most expensive costs for the Risk Management Division’s Workers’ Compensation claims. Changing the way the county works in this manner is setting a precedent that will potentially mitigate Workers’ Compensation claims by millions in the next few years.”

Other cost savings, she explains, have been substantial as well. “From fiscal 2007-2008, our expenditures on paper, toner cartridges, printer replacements and other related costs have decreased by 59% as a result of implementing Laserfiche. As our process becomes more streamlined and court systems become more technologically equipped to receive case filings electronically, we anticipate that these costs will decrease even more.

“So far,” she adds, “these savings have allowed us to avoid cutting staff for two years in a row!”

In addition, Bullock notes that use of Laserfiche has saved the Legal Department’s support staff approximately 10-15 hours per week, totaling roughly 3,500 hours a year. In particular, she appreciates that staff no longer has to spend days painstakingly stamping Bates Numbering onto each page of an evidentiary document; instead, Quick Fields does it automatically.

She explains, “With Laserfiche, our work product is better and our volume is higher, because the time we save on repetitive, manual tasks has been redirected to more substantive aspects of our jobs.”

Bullock believes that the benefits of Laserfiche—including lower costs, higher staff efficiency and increased confidentiality of client information—will continue to improve the department’s performance for years to come.

…into Public Health

For the Public Health Department, eliminating the need for document storage has driven the adoption of Laserfiche. “In February 2011, the department is moving into the county’s new Human Services Building, where there’s no space to store medical records,” explains Marcia Robinson, Local Public Health Administrator for Durham County.

“Prior to Laserfiche,” she adds, “we were storing current records in a 10’4” x 16’9” room, and we were archiving old records offsite with Iron Mountain. The process of finding, copying and filing records was both expensive and time intensive.”

Although the department has saved a significant amount of money on charts, labels, paper, document storage and toner, the real benefit has been the boost in customer service. According to Robinson, “Our medical records clerk no longer has to spend hours making copies to respond to requests from clinicians, practitioners, lawyers and other providers. She now has the option to e-mail the information directly from Laserfiche, eliminating backlogs and providing much more up-to-date files than she could when we were using paper records.”

She continues, “With Laserfiche, staff saves roughly 15 minutes per client during the registration process, reducing wait time and increasing our clinicians’ ability to serve more clients. Laserfiche also prevents many lost staff hours spent on chart preparation, along with the frustrations of searching for misfiled, misplaced and misnumbered charts.”

Overall, Robinson believes that Laserfiche is crucial to the department’s ability to respond efficiently and effectively to the needs of its clients. “In this time of budget constraints,” she says, “our investment in Laserfiche has paid great dividends.”

Overcoming the Limits of a Departmental Approach

Although these departments were all realizing great benefits from their use of Laserfiche, the lack of an enterprise approach to ECM was a problem.

Barden explains that there were two different resellers managing four separate Laserfiche deployments within Durham County. “Each department had a lot of flexibility to use the system as they saw fit,” he says, “but the IT Department didn’t have a lot of control over what was going on.”

For example, there was one repository on a drive that was never backed up, and a number of indexes that weren’t being backed up, either. In addition, Barden discovered that DSS had been scanning documents without using OCR, which made it difficult to find information contained in the repository. “When the IT Department doesn’t have central control over an organization’s ECM system, you run the risk of losing important information and other similar problems.”

Barden notes that the implementation hasn’t been without its flaws, but credits One Source Document Solutions, Durham County’s Laserfiche reseller, with being available to assist with any issues that arise.

“Although people aren’t always thrilled to let go of their paper,” he says, “in the long term we know that standardizing on Laserfiche is going to help the entire organization be more sustainable, more efficient and more available to our citizens. I had no idea what I was getting into when this project started, but it’s been gratifying to play a role in transforming the way the county does business.”

Chuck Beard, president of DynaSource, credits a year-long sales strategy leveraging the high-visibility success of its Spindletop Mental Health and Retardation Services account (which uses Laserfiche and SharePoint to support its Anasazi EMR system) with closing the deal.

“We put our efforts into making the Spindletop account the best it could be—for the client and for us,” says Beard. This meant spending early 2010 expanding Spindletop’s use of Laserfiche to several non-clinical departments (HR, Accounting, Admissions, etc.) using Quick Fields, Workflow and Web Access.

Beard points out that a major catalyst for the sale to ETBHN was a presentation given by Spindletop CIO Jerry Carnley to a statewide group of 40 CIOs in June. “He had the enthusiasm and tenacity to say ‘Here’s what we’ve done, we need to get this out to everybody,’” Beard explains.

ETBHN spent the summer assessing solutions before choosing to adopt Rio—and the Laserfiche/SharePoint integration—for all its agencies in late December. “ETBHN wanted a standardized application for each department that would offer standardized deployment across locations,” Beard explains. “Out of multiple competitors, Laserfiche was the only one with a single point of contact to access patient records through SharePoint.”

Beard is confident DynaSource can continue to build on this exponential success in 2011. “We used to focus on implementing cookie-cutter solutions; this is more like whole bakeries,” he says. “Spindletop represented not only a county-wide opportunity, but one that’s now regional, statewide and, ultimately, national in scope.”

Mergers and acquisitions account for much of SEPT’s growth, but innovation, says Dominic Malvern, Head of Information Systems Development, accounts for much of its ongoing success. “It’s never been a stereotypical government ‘Mental Health Organization,” Malvern says.

In fact, when SEPT transitioned from a purely state-funded trust to a more privatized “Foundation Trust,” one of its primary initiatives was to partner with Adobe to develop an EMR system using its LiveCycle products supported by a Laserfiche ECM system from Laserfiche reseller ScanDoc/Fortus. Malvern saw the chance to hit the ground running with a pilot project in the trust’s Forensic Services Department, which was moving to a new building as part of a modernization program.

“It was the ideal opportunity for us to modernize how our live patient records were accessed, as it was apparent that continuing with a manual process was not in keeping with the state of the art service we provide to our patients,” he says. That process, he adds, had remained manual by default because the legacy imaging system in Forensics didn’t meet the Trust requirement for working with live patient records.

“A single patient record could run for several years, sometimes through a person’s entire adult life, so it would extend into several volumes,” he explains. “Constant patient monitoring meant frequent updates to records for many reasons such as observation or treatment plans, sometimes every 15 minutes.”

A Pilot That Needed To Fly 24-7

When choosing a department to establish proof-of-concept before deploying a full-scale EMR system, SEPT couldn’t have chosen a more challenging one than Forensics Services—or one in which the impact of a successful ECM implementation would be so pronounced.

Malvern worked with ScanDoc’s Steve Livermore to implement a Laserfiche pilot system for active patient records management system using:

• Quick Fields advanced capture to input, sort and file the steady stream of patient information.
• Workflow to automatically route information for reviews, approval and distribution.
• Web Access to allow both remote deployment and access to the system over SEPT’s broad geographic service area and affiliated agencies.

SEPT implemented a clinical pilot project in 2009 and, over the course of a year, the new system kept up with the staff’s round-the-clock demands, amassing over 500,000 documents in the Laserfiche repository in the process.

Malvern says the real breakthrough operationally was having a system aligned with the increasing need for information sharing between regional service offices. “Increasingly we have to work on a multi-disciplinary and multi-agency basis, so having shared but secure access to patient records and notes is vital,” he says.

From an IT perspective, Web Access gave the organization one more tool to centrally control system administration while capitalizing on Laserfiche’s flexibility to configure various access levels remotely.

“Being able to deploy the system through our server or using Web browser options allowed us to control the type of access we wanted to make available,” says Malvern. “Web-based deployment is key because of the ease of maintenance when working with such a large group of users. Updates and upgrades would be unwieldy to deploy with a large number of single desktop clients.”

Going from EMR to ECM Saves $1.5M

The vision to extend Laserfiche from its supporting role in SEPT’s EMR project to a full-scale ECM deployment came with the support of ScanDoc/Fortus’ Livermore, who helped Malvern make the case to SEPT’s directors to implement Laserfiche for the trust’s non-clinical side.

“Once I heard the directors were looking at other solutions, and knowing what Laserfiche was capable of, it seemed a waste to restrict its application to purely clinical processes,” says Malvern. “Of course, it seemed an even bigger waste to spend further public money on more software that would be superfluous when we had a perfectly good system that would likely be better than anything else on the market.”

Now moving ahead with full-scale deployment of its Rio system to what will eventually be 3,000+ users, SEPT is effectively standardizing its information management on Laserfiche, eliminating the need for multiple departmental systems—and their corresponding service agreements and upgrades.

“Initially Laserfiche was envisaged solely as a clinical and medical records solution, but we have now realized that it can be a complete multi-functional document management system for the whole organization,” he says.

“We’ve begun implementation in non-clinical areas such Human Resources and Finance, as well as Vehicle Service Management, where we’re using Quick Fields and Workflow to automate our lease applications.” Additionally, another major project is underway to use Laserfiche to meet Information Governance Corporate Records retention regulations.

“From a roll-out prospective, it makes life much easier to have one multi-tasking system that all employees are trained on no matter what their function. It makes live support a far more streamlined and efficient activity,” he explains.

Malvern says the efficiency—and cost-savings—are starting to add up. “Within 18 months to two years we’ll be able to replace all our legacy imaging systems with Laserfiche. Implementing Laserfiche and its enterprise licensing enables SEPT to discontinue several annual contracts and service agreements. It also delivers savings on labor and print costs for information requests, as well as paper document archive and retrieval services. Realistically, this will save us US$1.5 million over the next three fiscal years,” he says.

With so many specialties—and specialists—IMC’s Board of Directors wanted to use electronic medical records (EMR) software to improve operational processes, encouraged by the promise of ARRA stimulus money to help fund it. But IMC’s Practice Administrator, Christine L. Holliman, CMPE, took a more pragmatic view of the situation.

“All vendors talk about the efficiencies of an EMR and the increase in the levels of coding that can be achieved from full implementation,” she says. “As my physicians are many different ages, the idea of transitioning to a full-blown EMR was daunting, to say the least.”

And expensive, especially in light of what Holliman perceived as a fundamental lack of functionality. “The document management portions of the leading EMR systems we looked at, including Greenway, Centricity and Allscripts, didn’t utilize OCR [optical character recognition] technology or any other shortcuts for actually scanning and filing documents,” Hillman notes. “Most EMR systems require manually sorting and dragging and dropping individual documents either back to an order or back to a patient record—very cost prohibitive in my opinion.”

Holliman focused on finding an enterprise content management system to establish electronic patient charts (e-charts) first. “Looking for a way to handle the paper felt like the most logical step in streamlining our practice in preparation for an EMR,” she says.

“As most of our physicians are still primary care, the sheer amount of paperwork we receive is just incredible,” Holliman adds. “We’d receive 2 ½ feet of paper a day in faxes, print-outs and mail—and that’s just from one of the two hospitals we work with.” At the same time, she notes, “as a multi-specialty practice with 20 providers, having a system that could allow access to patient records by multiple departments and personnel was critical.”

The 2 ½ Feet of Paper Stops Here

Holliman was introduced to Laserfiche by Jim Bergeron of reseller JPI Data Resource at the 2009 MGMA conference in Denver. She then met Bergeron again at a local HIMSS meeting. Encouraged by Laseriche’s ease of use and its flexible business process management (BPM) automation tools, IMC purchased a 44-user Laserfiche Avante system with Workflow business process management and Quick Fields capture tools to establish electronic patient charts.

“As anyone who has implemented new systems knows, the end users are the biggest variable. If they’re on board, the implementation will be a success,” Holliman says. “With 140 employees with varying computer experience, it was very nice to implement a product that anyone could be taught to use in just a few minutes.”

Key to establishing IMC’s e-charting was automating the way the clinic received patient information from the two hospitals it works with. Using Laserfiche in conjunction with the MD Network, an electronic patient information distribution platform, incoming documentation from hospital visits is processed by Quick Fields’ high-volume capture and processing tools, then automatically filed in Laserfiche according to patient name and date of birth, where it becomes part of patients’ e-charts.

A significant amount of this data is test results, which need to be reviewed by physicians; this review often prompts follow-up instructions and further review. “One of the worries of both physicians and practice managers is if test results have been reviewed and relayed back to the physicians,” says Holliman.

Prior to using Laserfiche, staff had to sort through faxes or independently request each report from the hospital while nurses manually pulled the paper charts. “We always worried that something got filed in a patient’s chart before it was ever reviewed by the physician,” Holliman adds. “We’d see 24 people a day and run tests on 22, and there’d always be that concern that there’s one ultrasound report no one ever saw.”

Flexible Control: Reviewing Test Results as a Condition of Filing Them

To automate the test review process, IMC created separate “inbox” folders in the Laserfiche repository for each physician. Quick Fields recognizes “test results” as a document type and the physician’s name associated with it, which Workflow then uses to route the results to the appropriate doctor and nurse’s folder. Workflow then alerts them they have items in Laserfiche for review. If a review deadline is not met, Holliman herself is notified.

“One of the things we really liked about Laserfiche was that all of our doctors can set their own parameters as far as what they need to see in their inboxes to review,” she says. A GI specialist who ordered a patient test, for instance, wouldn’t need to see an incoming discharge summary, but the patient’s primary care doctor would. The GI specialist would, however, need to review the results of a test he ordered, so only after he has reviewed it do the test and follow-up notes go to the primary care doctor’s inbox for review, and eventually to the patient’s file.

“Just using their inbox, each doctor can ask his or her nurse to follow up on their instructions. Whether it’s an abnormal lab or an abnormal chest X-ray, they can adjust medications or order further testing,” Holliman adds. The whole process is prompted, routed and tracked using Workflow.

The benefit, besides the economy of effort, is peace of mind, she says. “Our doctors can access the same, single inbox and know when they leave at the end of the day that they’ve seen every test result that needed to be dealt with on that day.”

Nurses who used to have to keep a manual log of all tests reviewed and what follow-up was ordered appreciate it as well, because logs can be generated automatically using simple search parameters. Plus, Holliman adds, “Being able to precisely track patient follow-up is a tremendous tool for mitigating medical legal liability costs, as we have an exact record of the doctor’s orders.”

IMC is also utilizing the Laserfiche/MD Network interface to automate other processes, such as recalling the dictation from an office visit. “After a report has been electronically signed, it’s printed in our medical records and stored automatically in Laserfiche. If, for some reason, a nurse on the floor needs that information before it’s been made a part of the patient’s record, she can still retrieve dictation from the last visit.” Likewise, when IMC’s triage nurses type up their notes from a phone conversation, they are automatically uploaded into Laserfiche.

Holliman credits Laserfiche’s ease-of-use as well as the overall efficiency of the system with the success of IMC’s e-charting adoption thus far. “The transition to a new system for people who’ve been utilizing a paper chart is very intimidating, but once they begin to use Laserfiche and see how truly easy it is to find and retrieve documents, they’re actually excited to get started,” adds Holliman.

A Natural Bridge to EMR—That Also Leads to Back Office Efficiency

Now that Laserfiche has made its impact on how doctors receive and act on incoming patient information, the clinic is rolling out Laserfiche for use in its business office, where Workflow will automate A/P processing and HR files updates.

“One thing that’s nice about Laserfiche is that it gives us a set of tools that can be applied to business management as well as practice management, so we’re really able to maximize our investment,” Holliman says.

At the same time, she adds, IMC is an important step closer to EMR adoption. “Laserfiche has definitely acted as an important bridge between where we were and where we want to be, and it’s done so in a way that’s been very natural.”

• Cardiology
• Dermatology
• Gastroenterology
• General Medicine
• Neonatology
• Obstetrics and Gynecology
• Orthopedics
• Psychiatry

Prior to implementing Laserfiche in 2007, PPS’s manual cash posting process was paper-driven. But from an operational and cost perspective, paper wasn’t a particularly efficient medium for PPS; even assigning the daily distribution of work was time consuming because someone had to manually review that day’s lock box payments and portion them out to the processors.

“At first, we tried implementing a different system to improve the efficiency of our operation,” said Stacy Devine, IT director at PPS. “But we had some security concerns with that system, and it also had a higher cost.”

Soon after, Russ Surette, director of billing operations, mentioned the situation to Mike McDonough at Duplitron, a hardware vendor and Laserfiche VAR that had long provided PPS with printers, scanners, copiers and other electronic devices. “Mike suggested that we take a look at Laserfiche, because it’s so easy to use.”

After doing its due diligence by talking to a number of Laserfiche users, PPS purchased a Laserfiche enterprise content management (ECM) system to streamline operational processes and eliminate the need to store paper office documents and training materials.

Leveraging Laserfiche

According to Surette, the use of Laserfiche—in conjunction with a few other initiatives—has helped PPS increase productivity by 20% over the past year, while at the same time increasing gross billings approximately 20%. When one employee left the company, the increased efficiency meant that PPS did not need to fill that position.

Here are a few of the benefits Laserfiche provides:

• Better security of information. “When you’re using paper or a file server, it’s nearly impossible to keep track of changes or restrict people from removing content,” says Devine. “Laserfiche’s security controls allow us to restrict access to folders in the repository by department and user, so that, for example, a claims processor will only see his or her assigned claims. This helps us better protect patient information and more easily comply with HIPAA.”
• Automatic data capture. Laserfiche Quick Fields automates information processing by capturing data from various formats and sorting documents according to custom criteria. For PPS, Quick Fields has simplified payment processing by automatically extracting data such as check number, transaction number and insurance carrier from bank image files and tagging it as metadata in the Laserfiche repository, where the images are stored by date. Surette says, “Before implementing Quick Fields, we had a full-time employee who did nothing but scanning and data entry all day long. Today, we have one part-time employee who scans for about 10 hours a week.”
• Smoother payment processing. After payment information is stored in the repository, Laserfiche Workflow routes it to specific claims processors based on the bank account number/insurance company associated with the payment. After the payment has been processed, Workflow automatically sends the information back to its original folder. When a claims processor is out of the office, Workflow automatically delegates his or her work to an alternate processor. “The distribution of daily work is much easier with Laserfiche,” says Surette. “Nobody has to sort through files to figure out what should go where.”
• Faster follow up. “The optical character recognition (OCR) process available through Laserfiche has made searching so much easier,” says Surette. “In the past, processors would have to look through 200-page documents to find the one paragraph that was relevant to an insurance follow up. OCR makes searching for specific words and phrases within a document easy, and it’s dramatically cut down on the amount of time our processors spend following up on claims.”
• Increased visibility and oversight. Laserfiche Audit Trail monitors, records and reports on system activity, providing the management team at PPS with a comprehensive overview of how quickly payments are processed and the value of the payments processed on any given day. “Laserfiche reporting eliminates the need to check spreadsheets,” says Surette.
• Easy integration with GE Centricity. By serving as integrative middleware that links into GE Centricity, PPS’ practice management system, Laserfiche allows staff members to access information stored in Laserfiche through the click of a button. With the integration, processors can access information in the manner and environment with which they are most comfortable, without toggling back and forth between applications.

Results

“Over the past year, even though one of our employees left and hasn’t been replaced, we’ve increased business by about 20%,” says Surette. “Implementing Workflow has been a huge part of that.”

PPS is, in fact, so satisfied with Workflow that Devine, Surette and Duplitron’s McDonough are planning to do a demo of Workflow at a regional training session for GE Centricity users this fall. “We recommend Laserfiche to other billing companies all the time,” says Surette. “When you’ve got something this good, you can’t just keep it to yourself.”

Quick Fields is not connected to the Laserfiche Repository at all times. It generally only connects when storing documents. (If you are using Laserfiche Capture Engine, it also connects when retrieving the documents.) Therefore, if changes are made to metadata settings in the Laserfiche Repository, such as a new template or field being added, a constraint being placed on a field or similar modifications, Quick Fields may not immediately become aware of the changes. You can update the information in Quick Fields by briefly connecting to the Laserfiche Repository with the Metadata Updater.

By default, the Metadata Updater will run automatically the first time the session is opened each day.

You can specify when and how the Metadata Updater will run from the Quick Fields options. You can adjust:

• Whether the Metadata Updater will run when a session is opened, and if so, whether it will run automatically the first time that day or every time.
• Whether to close the update progress report automatically or leave it open to view.
• Whether, where and how long to keep update log files.

The metadata for a particular document class can also be updated at any time. Under Connection Information, click Refresh to run the Metadata Updater.

In Quick Fields 8, you can also specify the particular tasks you want scanner operators to be able to perform. For example, you can determine whether they have the ability to delete documents or change scheduling options.

To set operator mode permissions for a particular session:

1. From the Tools menu, select Options, Current Session, and Permissions.
2. Require a password to administer the session, so that unless that password is entered, the session will open in operator mode. If you like, require a password to open it in operator mode as well.
3. Specify the settings you want scanner operators to be able to perform for this session. Click the Help button for more information on each option.

For similar ideas, see the Customizing the Quick Fields 8 Interface white paper.

• Support for additional barcode types: Barcode add-on now supports Code 93.
• Compression options for color and grayscale images: Option to compress color and grayscale images as JPEG/LZW rather than TIFF.
• Scanned queue options: Choices for what to do with documents in queue when scanning is stopped.

Note: In Quick Fields 8.0.0 or 8.0.1, installing a new add-on or removing an add-on requires you to deactivate and reactivate your Quick Fields installation. This process is still effective in Quick Fields 8.0.2.

To add or remove an add-on

1. Open Laserfiche Quick Fields.
2. From the Help menu, select Add new features.



3. Perform one of the following:
• If you are currently connected to the Internet, select the Register using an activation key option.This will automatically update your Quick Fields license. If you previously entered an activation key, it will automatically appear. Otherwise, you can type it in. If you enter a different activation key from the one previously used with this installation, you will be asked if you want to deactivate the old one.
• If you have been provided with an updated .licx license file, select the Provide a license file to use option and specify the location of your new .licx file. Use the Browse button to load a Windows directory browser.
4. The Laserfiche Quick Fields Activation dialog will appear. Click Activate to begin the activation process. You will be notified of a successful activation.



5. Close and reopen Quick Fields in order to have access to the new features.

According to McDonough, PPS’ IT Director became interested in Workflow after Duplitron created electronic lockboxes to batch claims documents using Quick Fields last year. “That brought us one step closer to automating the whole process,” he explains.

Actual Workflow implementation took place earlier this year as part of an upgrade to Laserfiche 8. “There were a lot of what I’d call ‘curveballs,’” says McDonough. “For instance, when we created the lockboxes, we split up the documents to be processed in Quick Fields based on their FSC coding, but that one lockbox had to remain intact—the documents could move but the folder couldn’t.”

Working with Laserfiche Presales Engineer Jonathon Kim as well as VAR Desk’s Lisa Durham and Jessica Smith, Duplitron configured Quick Fields and Workflow to fit the intricacies of PPS’s claims process—with significant results. “It use to take a day or two to process a claim; now it’s processed back in the batch folder within an hour,” McDonough says.

As a result, McDonough is confident Duplitron will be able to repeat this success with its other billing and coding clients. “We’ve already got four other clients using the electronic lockboxes to capture everything on the front end, so we can show them what PPS is doing and use that as a template.”

Meanwhile, PPS’s IT Director is impressed. “She’s worked in healthcare industry many years and never had a product that’s been able to do everything it says it can do.” Now, he adds, she’s asking how Workflow can be used as an accounting tool. “They want to use an exceptions report to reconcile claims, almost like a balance sheet,” McDonough says.

“This project has evolved has from a document management solution to a business process management solution—it’s true ECM from a claims perspective and BPM from a CFO/accounting point of view,” he concludes.

For example, you can:

• Convert word dates to numbers and vice versa (e.g., April to 04).
• Add or remove leading zeroes from single-digit months or days (e.g., 4/2/2007 to 04/02/2007).
• Format numbers to have a specific number of digits before or after the decimal, with or without leading zeroes.
• Convert numbers to percentages.
• Insert thousands separators.

The language and formatting used is based on the Windows regional settings for the computer running Quick Fields. The examples here are running on a computer set to English-United States regional settings.

Example: Reformatting a date

A user wants to use Quick Fields to file purchase order documents by month. She wants the month folders to appear in calendar order, but still allow people to recognize them by the name of the month. She wants each folder name to begin with a two-digit number for the month, followed by the three-letter abbreviation for the month; for instance, 01-Jan. The dates are currently written in a different format, such as January 29, 2010, but she can capture them and then format the token so the dates will have the desired appearance.

To format the token data:

1. Place the cursor in the token, right-click and select Token Editor.
2. Select Include Formatting.
3. For more information on the available syntax, click the help link to the right of the option. For this example, we will use the syntax MM-MMM.
4. The formatted token should display in the dialog box. For example, if the original token is %(Fields.Order Date), the newly formatted token should be %(Fields.Order Date,”MM-MMM”).
5. You can expand the Test the token section and enter a sample value to make sure the formatting works as expected. For instance, July 3, 2010 should be correctly converted to 07-July.
6. When the documents are stored in Laserfiche, folders will be created according to the desired naming convention.

The Laserfiche Support Site Forums are a good place to seek more information and assistance with this feature.

By default, only Quick Fields administrators can apply or manage process profiles. If you want scanner operators to be able to work with them, you can change the permissions for the session by going to Tools, Options, Current Session, Permissions, and selecting the actions you want operators to be able to perform.

To create process profiles:

1. Open the Profiles Pane: from the View menu, select Panes and Profiles. Or look for the Profiles tab.
2. Decide whether to create a public process profile (accessible to any Windows user working with that session) or a personal process profile (only accessible to a particular Windows user). Select the appropriate node.
3. Right-click and select Add Profile. A new profile will appear.
4. The best practice is to give the profile a name that conveys its function. To rename the profile, right-click and select Rename. Type a new name for the profile.
5. Select the name of the profile and then select the processes or image enhancements you want from the Tasks Pane.
6. Configure the processes or image enhancements.
7. Optional: Test the processes or enhancements on the default sample image.

To apply process profiles:

1. Right-click on the document in the Document Revision Pane.
2. Select Run Process and either Public Process Profile or Personal Process Profile. Select the name of a profile.

To import or export process profiles:

By default, process profiles will not be imported or exported with the session. As of Quick Fields 8.0.1, you can go to Tools, Options, Import/Export, and choose whether to include process profiles when either importing or exporting a session.

“Most people don’t have pleasant memories associated with hospital stays: You’re sick, you’re scared, you’re away from your family,” says Shawana Rucker, IT manager at SSCBR. “SSCBR’s goal is to change all of that.”

Founded in 2003 as a physician-owned specialty hospital, SSCBR set forth to serve the needs of the local community. In 2008, the physicians partnered with Our Lady of the Lake Hospital and continue to provide a patient-focused facility serving the needs of the community. In this capacity, SSCBR is fully committed to providing the highest level of patient care. This commitment extends from architectural design to inpatient amenities, staffing and even medical records requests.

“As a specialty hospital, SSCBR uses the most advanced technology available to enhance the level of patient care—and not just in the operating room,” explains Rucker. “For example, Laserfiche gives us a user-friendly way to provide staff with instant access to the information they need to admit and treat patients. It also allows us to respond more quickly to patient requests regarding billing or medical records inquiries.”

Easy Road to EMR

With approximately 200 employees and a patient load of nearly 20,000 hospital services per year, SSCBR wanted to scan and store patient records in an electronic format, but its health information system (HIS) could not handle the high volume of content required.

“We’d only been open for a year,” says Rucker, “and we were already running out of space for record storage. We thought HIS would solve our problem, but when it didn’t, we turned to Laserfiche for help.”

In 2005, SSCBR purchased Laserfiche from JPI Data Resource, a Laserfiche reseller that specializes in healthcare deployments. “We chose Laserfiche because it’s so easy to use,” explains Rucker. “Although it doesn’t fulfill all of the government’s criteria to be considered a comprehensive EMR, Laserfiche has absolutely given us a centralized and secure way to manage our electronic records.”

To get records into the system, SSCBR uses Laserfiche Quick Fields, a high-volume document capture and processing tool. By automating the capture process as follows, Quick Fields eliminates the potential for keystroke errors when digitizing records:

• SSCBR puts barcodes on hardcopy medical records so that they can be easily scanned into Laserfiche.
• Quick Fields reads a barcode, automatically capturing important patient identifiers.
• Quick Fields automatically creates the folder structure and autofiles the patient’s scanned records.

“Laserfiche definitely makes life easier for our staff,” says Rucker. “It saves a lot of time on data entry with only minimal training. The only thing end users need to do in Quick Fields is tell the system where to store the records.”

In addition to simplifying patient records management, Laserfiche also streamlines admissions procedures by allowing SSCBR’s front-desk personnel to quickly scan and process insurance cards, driver’s licenses, patient history forms and more. Likewise, Laserfiche speeds the billing process by providing on-demand access to patient EOBs, claims and statements.

From a patient care perspective, Laserfiche enables staff members to locate medical records, admissions items and billing information within seconds so that they can answer patient inquiries faster. “Whether a patient is onsite or phoning in with a follow up question, our employees don’t have to search through boxes of paper files anymore,” says Rucker. “Laserfiche makes it fast and easy to keep our patients informed.”

Securing Compliance

As with any hospital or medical practice, protecting the integrity of patient information—and complying with HIPAA—is critical to SSCBR’s success. Laserfiche provides comprehensive security that protects sensitive information while still allowing authorized personnel to instantly access necessary files.

According to Rucker, SSCBR integrated Laserfiche with Windows Active Directory® to simplify the authentication process. “The IT department assigns Laserfiche rights and privileges to staff through Active Directory, which makes it easy for people to log into the system and easy for us to administer,” she says.

“We have role-based security in place. People in the admissions department see the admissions items. People in the business office see the EOBs. Clinical staff has access to the medical records. Most people have read-only access to the documents they’re authorized to view. With Laserfiche Audit Trail, we have the ability to run security audits, but I run them very rarely because the security controls are so good that people really can’t do anything wrong.”

What’s Next

SSCBR is very pleased with the benefits it has received from Laserfiche over the past five years. “The system is easy to use, it doesn’t require much training and it saves us a lot of time,” explains Rucker.

Moving forward, SSCBR is considering implementing Laserfiche Workflow in its purchasing department. Workflow enables organizations to automate collaborative business processes by designing custom workflows to fit their needs. A workflow automatically performs specified actions at appropriate times, such as sending a document to a specific user, populating a field, adding a tag or sending an e-mail.

According to Rucker, Workflow would deliver additional time-saving benefits during the procurement process, “especially for activities such as creating POs.”

At the end of the day, though, SSCBR’s investment in Laserfiche comes back to the standard of care. “Patient service is important,” Rucker concludes. “In that, we strive to be like a five-star hotel. Laserfiche helps us to operate more efficiently and effectively, and by accelerating our response to patients, it enables us to increase their comfort level as well.”

That meant finding a way to help staff keep up with processing the 50,000 pages of statements that arrived in the mail each month, adding to the 20 years of back files spread out over 400 square feet of file cabinet space that had already spilled over into two storage lockers filled with statements and account records.

“We decided to go paperless,” says Mike Adams, Cambridge’s Director of Information Technology, who turned to Laserfiche reseller Gordon Flesch Company to help tailor a solution that could capture the up to 50,000 pages and merge them seamlessly with the firm’s own business processes and existing information systems. “When they recommended Laserfiche, we decided to go for it.”

“Going for it,” meant capturing the maximum amount of information per page at the point of entry, and that required configuring Laserfiche Quick Fields to accommodate the 100 different formats of broker statements arriving every month. Adams and Cambridge’s IT developers used the Laserfiche SDK, which, with its powerful integration tools, sample C# and Visual Basic.NET source code, allowed them to create custom connections between Lotus Notes/Domino, the firm’s CRM, and Quick Fields. As Adams explains, once a document is scanned into Quick Fields, Zone OCR and Pattern Matching match it using one of the 90 broker and bank statement sessions. “Quick Fields recognizes the broker account number on each document and populates the Laserfiche template fields with information from Lotus Notes/Domino and our portfolio management  software,” he says. Adams’ team also created custom scanner profiles to use for each broker’s forms that would optimize scanning on documents with, say, background anti-tampering lines or colors that would otherwise reduce OCR accuracy.

The effect of this enhanced automated capture was pronounced and immediate. Cambridge was already required to reconcile incoming statements with their internal accounting system within 14 days; just processing the incoming statements could take up to three days. But thanks to the custom connections Adams’ IT team built for Quick Fields, this now could all be done in a single day. “We get our statements processed and viewable in Laserfiche in less time than it used to take to sort the paper before,” Adams says. “It used to take up to three days with our old information management system, now they’re in the database and the information’s in use the same day it arrives. To date we have scanned 1.8 million pages.”

Cambridge has recently upgraded to Quick Fields 8 to turn what was a multi-step process into a single one during an actual Quick Fields session. “We want to take full advantage of the new real-time capabilities for database matching,” he says. “We want to move custom scripting out of Quick Fields and use Quick Fields Agent to extract data as documents are being scanned at the point of capture instead of post scanning.”

Besides providing better service to its customers, Cambridge has proven itself a valuable contributor to the Laserfiche Community. Adams notes some of the firm’s staff are members of the new GFC Laserfiche User Group in the Columbus area. Adams adds that Cambridge will be publishing its Quick Fields template files for other registered investment advisors to use, with details and specifications available at his class in the Industry Solutions track at this year’s Laserfiche Institute Conference January 11-13 in Los Angeles.

Cambridge is also a member of the Laserfiche Professional Development Partnership (PDP) program. “Gordon Flesch Company suggested that there was a demand among their clients for more custom programs,” explains Adams. “We plan to keep developing these tools to integrate Laserfiche directly into the menus of applications such as Great Plains and Auto CAD. We have everything we need,” he says, “but we are looking to help other Laserfiche users. Everyone wins.”

No one as much as Cambridge staff themselves. Staffers can process 35-60 pages a minute, with an error rate of less than 0.5%, and whatever errors do occur are automatically corrected through a series of tools built to correct common OCR mistakes. Misfiled and lost documents have been reduced to virtually zero. The process is so efficient, the firm has implemented all tasks without additional staff. Additionally, Cambridge has reclaimed 400 square feet of file cabinet space and two storage lockers, since Laserfiche allows for off-site storage backup – meeting SEC and broker dealer contingency plan requirements. The efficiency is so cost-effective, Adams says Cambridge has realized its ROI in less than one year after implementing Laserfiche.

For his part, Adams credits the company’s success so far with being able to take full advantage of the expanded functionality of Quick Fields using the Laserfiche SDK to automate and enhance very unique and important business processes.

“I like that Laserfiche has an SDK available and that it works well. A number of programs don’t have one available,” Adams says. “It’s malleable to all sorts of enterprise applications.”

These language packs include the French, Arabic and Portuguese components for Quick Fields and Quick Fields Agent 8.0.1. They perform best in the French, Arabic and Portuguese operating systems, but are also compatible with operating systems of other languages.

The language packs work with the English version of Quick Fields and Quick Fields Agent 8.0.1 to provide user interface in French, Arabic or Portuguese. They can be installed on top of the already released Quick Fields and Quick Fields Agent 8.0.1.

To assign a new shortcut to a command

1. Select Customize Keyboard under Tools in the menu bar.
2. Commands are organized into categories in the Shortcut Keys dialog box. Select a category from the drop-down box.
3. Select a command. A description of the command will appear at the bottom of the dialog box.
4. To assign the command a new shortcut, place your cursor in the text box under Press new shortcut key.
5. Press a shortcut key combination.

Example: CTRL+W, CTRL+SHIFT+Y, CTRL+SHIFT+ALT+O

6. Select Assign. If the command already has a shortcut, it will be replaced.

When created, custom keyboard shortcuts are associated only with the current user and machine. They can also be included when exporting and importing Quick Fields sessions. In Quick Fields 8.0.1 or higher, you can specify whether or not to include custom keyboard shortcut keys when exporting or importing sessions.

To change importing and exporting settings for custom keyboard shortcuts

1. From the Tools menu, select Options and the Import/Export node.
2. Under both Export Options and Import Options, you can select Custom shortcut keys to include them when importing or exporting, or clear the check box so they will not be included.

Note: If you are unfamiliar with OmniPage Zone OCR, see its help topic in the online help files here.
Real-World Scenario
The Acme Corporation scans documents that list multiple phone numbers. They have built a Quick Fields session that OCRs the numbers and inserts each as a separate value into a multi-value field.

How Can I Do This?
By default, if an OmniPage Zone OCR region encompasses multiple lines of text, it only OCRs the first line. You must configure the process to capture all lines as a multi-value token, then insert the token into a multi-value field.

1. After adding an OmniPage Zone OCR process to your session and configuring its zones, select one of the zones and click Advanced options.

   

2. In the Advanced Options dialog box, set Single Line to False and Create multi-value token to True.



3. Insert the token into a multi-value field that has been assigned to one of your session’s document classes.

“Leading companies around the globe are turning to ECM to improve their information management architecture,” said Laserfiche Senior Vice President Chris Wacker. “This educational conference will highlight how Laserfiche increases operational efficiency by providing centralized administration, standards and control while still offering department-level flexibility.”

At the conference, Laserfiche will debut the Arabic version of Quick Fields 8, a document imaging and capture front-end for the Laserfiche ECM product suite that captures and indexes unstructured content from paper forms, faxes, databases and software applications.

Laserfiche will also honor five customers that have demonstrated dedication to excellence, leadership and innovation in implementing Laserfiche solutions: Mobile Interim Company 2 (now known as MTC Lebanon); BankMed, Lebanon; National Transportation Authority, UAE; Ministry of Defense and Aviation Medical Services Department, Saudi Arabia; and Saudi Arabian Airlines.

“Laserfiche has a network of outstanding international resellers, including BMB Group from Lebanon; Integrated Solutions for Business (ISB) from Saudi Arabia; and Mazroui & Partners (MAP) from the United Arab Emirates,” said Sean Tang, International Business Director at Laserfiche. “The winners of this year’s Laserfiche Visionary Awards could not have achieved such a high level of success without the knowledge and experience their resellers brought to the table.”

Laserfiche resellers participating in the 2009 conference include BMB Group (Lebanon), ISB (KSA), MAP (UAE), Al Zayani (Bahrain), ARCOM (KSA), Computer Information Technologies (Libya), Expert Business Solutions (Kuwait), First Leader Trading (UAE), Global Technology Services (UAE), Guard Solutions (Sudan), Handynet (Algeria), Itqan Technologies (Qatar), OFFTEC IT Solutions (Jordan), Pixel Digital Systems (UAE), Solutions Middle East (UAE) and Efor Technology (Turkey).

About Laserfiche

Laserfiche® creates simple and elegant enterprise content management (ECM) solutions that help organizations run smarter. Since 1987, more than 27,000 organizations worldwide—including federal, state, and local government agencies and Fortune 1000 companies—have used Laserfiche software to streamline document, records and business process management.

Laserfiche distributes its software through a worldwide network of value-added resellers (VARs), who tailor solutions to clients’ individual needs. The Laserfiche VAR program has received the Five-Star Rating from Computer Reseller News/VARBusiness magazine.

Laserfiche is a registered trademark of Compulink Management Center, Inc.

For more information, please contact:
Maya Abou Jawdeh, BMB, Tel: +961-1-294504 /ext:176,
Email: maya.aboujawdeh@bmbgroup.com

But then we were looking at a new program, new processes and new documents for this Housing Affordability Grant program. Applicants send in a signed application with a copy of their federal return, which we must retain. When they are entered in the database designed for this process, a “cover sheet” is printed and placed on top. Since the cover sheet is the same format for all the documents, it was an easy Quick Fields fit. But we didn’t want to have to try to OCR the name and other data into the Laserfiche document template, because it’s already available in the program’s database and user entry or even OCR entry would potentially lead to errors and repairing. 100% accuracy could be achieved only by using the database data. So, we have Quick Fields OCR the parcel number and go get the name and other information from the database based on the parcel number match! So simple and yet, without the right tool, a complex programmatic issue!

More to come very soon about a Virginia Statewide User Group Seminar Dec 1st in Chesterfield, VA. Stay tuned ….

The Investment Dealers Association of Canada (IDA) requires securities firms to verify client signatures when existing clients change their account information. While Credential was complying with this regulatory demand, they were simply running out of space to house all the paper client files required to verify signatures.

“Our staff needed instant access to client information, but we didn’t have space to store all our client files onsite,” remembers Vice President of Operations Ernie Nichiporik.

Mr. Nichiporik and his team began researching digital document management solutions, focusing their efforts on finding a secure, scalable Web-based solution that was still easy to use. “We really wanted a Web-based solution, so external parties could access the system even if they weren’t connected to our network,” he says. “And security features were key—we had to guarantee that our client files were safe and tamper-proof.”

After attending a presentation by IKON Office Solutions, Mr. Nichiporik and his colleagues chose a Laserfiche® digital document management system. “It had everything we needed. It was secure, easy-to-use, cost-effective and didn’t require a lot of time to implement.”

Within seven months, employees were fully benefiting from the new system. “Installation didn’t take long,” Nichiporik says, “and we started realizing benefits quickly. The seven month time frame to full productivity was due to the fact that we imaged all of our existing files, as well as new files coming in.”

Currently, over 60 users, located in four offices over 3,000 miles apart, use the Laserfiche system. Credential has three different business lines, and they store all their client files—including scanned paper documents, faxes and e-mails—in their Laserfiche repository. Documents are easily accessible thanks to templates that store the account number, document type and the department that last worked on the document. Credential also created a folder structure for the six different administration departments that house working documents, so that all company staff can locate documents that haven’t yet been archived in the client’s folder.

To further optimize business processes, Credential implemented several tools to automate document import and storage. Import Agent™ monitors the company’s network folder for new faxes, imports them into the Laserfiche repository and dynamically creates new folders to store them. Quick Fields™ document capture tools automate document scanning and storage, creating the file structure with different templates for each of Credential’s three business lines. The Quick Fields Real Time Lookup module accesses three different SQL databases to retrieve client information from the appropriate business line and automatically fill each scanned document’s template fields with client demographic information.

Staff who only need to view documents retrieve them through WebLink™, a read-only document viewer accessible through their Web browser. Users who have to add additional information to client files use Web Access™, a Web-based thin client that simplifies deployment and support. “Web Access really makes upgrades to the system easier, because we only have to install them on our Web server, instead of on each computer,” Nichiporik says.

“We also have a few ‘power users,’ who use the Windows®-based Laserfiche Client™ to scan and index documents,” he continues. “Using all three modules really fits our needs—and demonstrates the system’s flexibility. Instead of being locked into one option, we chose a combination of options to meet our exact requirements.”

Nichiporik believes that clients really appreciate the changes Laserfiche has brought to the company—“They really like that when they phone us with an issue, we have all their documentation in front of us,” he says—which is due to the secure digital storage of their files. Their previous paper-based storage system left staff dealing with lost faxes and misplaced documents, which made it difficult to respond to client requests in a timely manner. Thanks to Laserfiche, lost faxes have dropped by over 50%. “Now, only three people in the entire company have the authority to delete documents, whereas with paper files, anyone could misplace or lose a document in a file,” he says.

Credential also implemented the Audit Trail™ module to further guarantee security. Audit Trail tracks user actions within the Laserfiche system, simplifying compliance with regulatory requirements. “With Audit Trail, I can easily show IDA regulators that employees are looking up client signatures while updating client information, and I can also show them that we have a highly secure process to manage our client documents,” Nichiporik says.

Because of the company’s initial success with Laserfiche, Credential is actively planning to expand the solution. “Eventually, we’d like to integrate Laserfiche with our trading system, so that our sales force can easily access client documents during the trading process,” Nichiporik says. “Not to mention that many departments within the firm have seen how well the system works, and now want imaging for themselves.

“Because of Laserfiche, we now expect immediate access to documents,” he continues. “Laserfiche solves problems for us every day. It’s easy to use, easy to implement and works well in many different environments. Laserfiche is really a superior solution.”

Quick Fields 8.0.1 enhancements include:

• Zone OCR improvements: place a token in a multi-value field and each line of the captured zone automatically becomes a separate value. Custom character preferences can be set for letters, numbers or punctuation on a per-character basis.
• Capture and Configuration improvements: search for documents – by path, field, token or text – and multi-select the results to store, delete or bookmark for later processing. Also create settings for whether to keep toolbar and pane layouts, custom keyboard shortcuts, process profiles, and Quick Fields options when importing or exporting sessions.
• Quick Fields Agent Expanded Scheduling Options: Set schedules to run once, daily, weekly or monthly, or to specify an end date. Sessions can also be set to either scan, store, or scan and store. Multiple sessions can be prioritized and run at the same time.
• Quick Fields Agent Expanded Reporting and Validation: allow global event viewer to easily check on errors and view a history of every scheduled session. Also session validation is available so Quick Fields Agent will not run into message prompts while processing.
• Quick Fields Scripting Kit Release: includes nine hooks into Quick Fields processing where users can run custom scripts that can each add data, such as setting fields and tokens, to the document or page objects. Comes with a fully functional Visual Studio-like project with external references, organizational folders, and C# or VB autocomplete system. Multiple document interface and GUI provide feedback about the script status.