In the fast-paced, often chaotic world of healthcare, every second counts. For a multi-state healthcare organization with 50 locations, the challenge wasn’t just delivering quality patient care; it was also managing the complex web of administrative tasks that often pulled their staff away from what mattered most — patients.
“Our corporate mission statement is to deliver quality, effective nursing care to our seniors, pediatrics and young adults,” said Jeff Nichols, chief technology officer at The Alden Network. “But our mission from an IT perspective is to deliver a great experience to our clients, who are also our fellow employees.”
One factor getting in the way of that mission was the organization’s reliance on manual processes. Documents were being faxed, emailed, or physically carried from one department to another. This led to delays and prevented staff from spending all their time and skills on patient care.
To address the issue, Alden turned to Laserfiche. Now, instead of faxes and emails, the organization has over 100 automated Laserfiche Forms processes in place, with even more on the way. The solution has improved efficiency by 70% to 80%, allowing staff to refocus their time and talent to patients.
The Problem: Monotonous Tasks and Wasted Time
Before Laserfiche, core business processes — like those in human resources or accounts payable — were not only manually driven but also largely inconsistent across Alden’s 50 locations. When the Alden IT team began looking for an electronic document management system, they saw in Laserfiche a larger opportunity for consistent data orchestration.
“We thought that document storage was going to be 90% of how we used Laserfiche,” Nichols said. “But we are now using Laserfiche Forms and workflow automation in a significant way. Laserfiche Forms helps us get the tasks into the hands of our users, and workflow does all the backend processing of the data.”
In the accounts payable (AP) department, for instance, employees were using triplicate carbon copy forms for purchase orders (POs). “Correspondence [was] going back and forth in email, or some buildings were even just sending a stack of paper in a tote via courier to the AP department,” said Ralph Reinhofer, IT project manager at Alden Network. AP processors had to manually match invoices to receipts, a cumbersome process that could easily lead to delays.
Another company-wide activity — the onboarding process for new hires — was also full of manual, disconnected tasks. “There were times IT would find out that when someone started, they didn’t get a notebook, or door access, or whatever they needed,” Nichols explained. These manual tasks were not just frustrating; they also detracted from the core mission of providing excellent care.
The Solution: Streamlining with Forms and Workflow
“One of the main goals with Laserfiche was removing monotonous, repetitive tasks from our employees, so they can spend more time focusing on the patient, or things related to patient care, rather than moving data from one place to another,” said Reinhofer.
Laserfiche Forms and workflow were the key to solving some of Alden Network’s biggest challenges. Working with Laserfiche solution provider Proven IT, Alden used Laserfiche as a solution to automate AP processes and streamline HR administration. This initiative allowed Alden to digitize and standardize operations across all 50 locations.
Now, instead of relying on couriers or faxes to send information between locations, the organization manages a wide range of tasks digitally. These include:
- Purchase order approvals: A digitized PO process replaced the old triplicate carbon copies, allowing locations to upload delivery receipts and confirm orders digitally. This resulted in significant time savings, plus more on-time payments and a better experience for vendors.
- Onboarding and offboarding: The new onboarding process ensures that new hires have everything they need on their first day, from temporary passwords to door access. This process was a critical improvement, Nichols noted, not only for new hires, but also promotions and intracompany transfers.
- Customer care surveys: The organization’s customer care surveys are now streamlined through Laserfiche, providing a more efficient way to collect patient feedback.
- HR and payroll tasks: Rate changes, uniform orders, and other HR-related tasks are all handled through standardized forms, supporting consistency and accuracy. A Laserfiche integration with Alden’s HRIS pulls milestones like new hire dates and anniversary dates to further streamline these processes.
- Expense reimbursement: Requests submitted by employees are automatically routed to the appropriate personnel. These requests are resolved swiftly, with receipts and other documentation archived as needed.
“Name any internal business process at Alden, and there’s probably a Laserfiche form for it,” Reinhofer said. “And we’ve now given everyone a single way to do everything, so there’s a lot of consistency now.”
The consistency is not only more efficient, but it also helps with employee retention and recruitment. When a new employee needs to learn a process, “there are four other buildings doing it the same way and there’s certainly enough people they can lean on to ask, ‘How does this work?’” Nichols explained. “And it’s always the same answer.”
The Results: A Shift in Focus
Since implementing Laserfiche, Alden has seen dramatic improvements in efficiency and productivity. The team has automated over 100 Laserfiche Forms processes with more on the way. Many of these automated processes now run 70% to 80% more efficiently than the manual workflows they replaced. Work that required a full week of manual effort can now be completed in an hour, allowing the IT team to manage workloads that were previously difficult to scale. “We created a monster, because we let the staff think outside of the box,” Nichols said. “Anything that they’ve asked for, we’ve made it into a process. We don’t fault them, because we started this — and it’s effective.”
Alden also relies on Laserfiche to support evolving Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services CMS administrative requirements. The platform’s flexibility allows the team to respond quickly to regulatory changes while maintaining consistent documentation and tracking across the organization.
The most significant benefit has been empowering staff to focus on their core duties. By automating repetitive administrative tasks, the organization has freed up employee time. “We know people have other things to do,” Nichols said. “They have better uses of their time than these manual tasks you can deploy a robot to do. That’s essentially what Laserfiche has done for us.”
Ultimately, the goal has been to get back to the heart of the organization’s mission. “We want our clinicians to do clinical work,” Nichols explained. “The IT department doesn’t know how to take care of your mom or dad or grandparent. We want the clinicians to do that. We don’t want processes to take our healthcare providers away from what they do best.”
