How Collin County Automates the Early Identification of Mental Illness Process

Laserfiche Solution Contributed By: Paul Garrison, Records / ERMS Specialist and Tim Nolan, Senior Applications Manager, Collin County, TX

Collin County, TX is one of the fastest growing counties in Texas and the nation. The county’s population is 980,000 and the county is part of the Dallas/Fort Worth Metroplex.

In order to serve an expanding population, the county has been shifting to digitizing and automating many business processes in multiple departments. One recently automated process that has a huge impact is the Early Identification of Mental Illness (EIMI) process in the jail.

Every person who is booked into jail has to go through a mental health screening. Certain inmates who complete the screening end up being placed on a mental health watch list. Each person must go through the entire process in 12 hours for the jail to not incur violations.

The EIMI process used to be entirely paper and email based, resulting in lost documentation and failed audits. The county decided to streamline it with Laserfiche Forms and Workflow.

“The most essential reason for automating and standardizing this process is that we don’t want anyone slipping through the cracks,” says Tim Nolan, Senior Applications Manager. “The new Laserfiche process has become one of the most critical systems in the county.”

Processing has decreased from four hours a day to minutes

Whenever a person is booked into jail, the booking staff fills out an extensive electronic form that contains Yes or No questions about the person’s mental health. Any Yes answer is considered a red flag.
The EIMI screening is performed using a Laserfiche form. Click the image to see the whole form

 Once the form is submitted, it is added into the queue for the medical team to review. If the medical team doesn’t finish review of the form within an hour then the supervisor is notified to sign off on the form instead. In order to simplify medical and supervisor review, any questions with a Yes answer are highlighted in blue.
In order to improve review, all questions with an answer of Yes are highlighted in blue
The workflow that notifies the supervisor if the medical team doesn’t review the EIMI form within an hour

Once the supervisor approves the form, Laserfiche Workflow generates a report from the data and emails it to the magistrate. If no one signs off within eight hours, the magistrate is also notified that the review isn’t finished.
The email that is sent to the magistrate contains a link to the Laserfiche folder where the EIMI form and relevant documents is stored
The report that is sent to the magistrate is generated through Workflow using SQL Server Reporting Services
A section of the workflow that generates the report and emails the magistrate

All forms, whether completed or incomplete, are stored in folders in Laserfiche with appropriate records management properties automatically applied.
All screening forms are stored in the records management section of the repository and kept for one year

Each form has its review and approval history included on the first page, which simplifies audits.
The history of each screening is recorded and timestamped

This is what the entire process looks like in the Laserfiche Forms process model:
The EIMI process is created in Laserfiche Forms

EIMI is one of the most critical processes in the county

The EIMI process is up 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Processing time has decreased from four hours a day to just minutes. Audits are so much more painless since the full history of each screening is recorded and timestamped along with the form. Timers and notifications enable screenings to take no more than 12 hours to complete from start to finish, ensuring that the county is following rules and regulations.

How Symbria Inc. Uses Laserfiche to Streamline Plans of Care for Patients

Laserfiche Solution Contributed By: Hien Do, Software Development Manager; Boris Remus, Senior Software Engineer, Symbria Inc.

Symbria Inc. provides therapy services to hundreds of skilled nursing facilities. The organization was challenged with manual paper processing prior to implementing Laserfiche. One area that was especially paper heavy and inefficient was obtaining the required physician signatures and dates on the patient plans of care forms.

Within 30 days from the start of a patient’s care, their treatment plan must be approved by a physician or reimbursement for the treatment may be denied. Previously, the Rehab Program Manager printed a patient’s plan of care from the therapy software. The plan of care was then hand delivered or faxed it to the appropriate physician for a signature. Once the signatures were obtained, the Rehab Program Manager scanned in the plan and attached it to the patient’s record back into the therapy software. The program manager would also have to fax or hand-deliver the plan of care to the medical records department at the facility in order for the payments to be processed correctly.

Rehab Program Managers, who are highly trained therapists themselves, spent a lot of their time performing administrative tasks like tracking which documents haven’t been signed and following up with physicians who did not sign the plans of care. Facilities vary greatly in size which means some process a small number of documents a week, while others can process in excess of 100. This volume resulted in a significant amount of program manager time investment.

Symbria evaluated the entire process and decided to use Laserfiche to optimize it. The current process transfers most of the work from the Rehab Program Manager to the staff at the corporate office and uses Laserfiche Forms and Workflow to automate routing and faxing.

The Plan of Care is Routed and Faxed Electronically

The new process still starts with the Rehab Program Manager generating the plan of care document, but now, he or she uploads it to a Laserfiche form. From there, everything is handled by staff at the corporate office.

Once the plan of care is uploaded and the form is submitted, the plan of care is saved in the repository and Laserfiche Workflow creates and stamps a barcode onto the document. The barcode uniquely identifies the plan of care. Workflow then runs a series of checks to make sure that the information in the plan of care is correct. Workflow checks that:

  • The physician identification number has 10 digits
  • The patient name is valid
  • The therapy discipline is valid
  • The date is valid

 

If the plan of care does not pass all the checks, then it must be validated manually. The corporate processing staff performs the validation task in Laserfiche Forms.

Once the plan of care is validated, Laserfiche Workflow looks the physician up in the database to obtain his or her fax number. The document is then faxed digitally to the fax number using a faxing service.

When the physician signs and faxes the document back, Symbria receives an electronic version of the document from the fax service that is then imported into Laserfiche using the Import Agent. Workflow reads the barcode to associate the document with the original and routes it to the processing staff at the corporate office to verify the document is correctly signed and dated. Once that step completes, the processing staff attaches the document to the patient’s record in the therapy software and Workflow sends a copy to the medical records department at the appropriate skilled nursing facility.

If the physician doesn’t return the plan of care in a timely matter, the corporate staff member gets a task assigned to him or her in Forms to follow up with the physician. When opening the task, the staff member sees helpful information, such as the physician’s fax and phone numbers. The physician is also automatically notified through Workflow on a regular basis if he or she hasn’t sent back the signed plan of care.

Automation Saves Each Facility an Average of Five Hours a Week

On average, with this automation, each facility saves five hours a week by not having to manually fax and deliver plans of care. The largest benefit, though, is that the Rehab Program Manager no longer has to obtain physician’s signatures. Instead of chasing physicians down, the Rehab Program Manager can focus more on patient care. Laserfiche also gives the company stringent control over document access, which is a must in the heavily regulated healthcare industry.

An Effortless New Hire Process

The Osceola County Sheriff’s Office transformed its Human Resources division by shifting from paper-based methods to become a digital agency using Laserfiche software. The digitization initiative increased efficiency, time management and accuracy, revolutionizing the ways in which the Sheriff’s Office stored documents, communicated within its department, and implemented its onboarding process with new employees.

Seamless Recruiting Tools

The Osceola County Sheriff’s Office is a local law enforcement agency based in central Florida. The agency is the largest and chief law enforcement agency in the county, with 850 employees within the department.

Before Laserfiche, the agency grappled with a diminished amount of storage room and needed a more effective solution for managing documents. Interdepartmental communication problems led to delays in the application process and, at times, lost documents when paper forms were mailed.

The agency first turned to Laserfiche to create a pre-employment application that is accessible to the public through the county’s website. The initial results were staggering, with application intake tripling from about 50 applications per month to now as many as 150 per month.

“We’re facing a nationwide shortage of police officers,” said Haylee Glasscock, Human Resources Technician, Osceola County’s Sheriff’s Office. “Making our application easily accessible online has helped with our recruiting efforts and was a good move for our agency. The application is extensive—it used to be 25 paper pages. With Laserfiche, we now can host recruiting fairs since the online application allows people to apply right then and there. Other applicants may apply via a secure link. In 2012, we had 446 paper applications. In the first year we had Laserfiche, we had 1,305.”

There are multiple job application forms the agency utilizes depending on the applicant, including a criminal history version which is longer compared to one created for recent graduates planning to move into the role of a deputy.

“With paper applications, people would leave fields blank; we had to call them to come in and fill out the information,” said Glasscock. “Now we no longer have incompletes and it saves us time. We can also have people upload files, photos of tattoos, and more—all within the application.”

After an applicant applies online, Laserfiche’s business process automation capabilities allow the agency to perform a paperless background check and file sign-off through its chain of command. Laserfiche simultaneously sends automatic email notifications to keep the applicant updated on the review process—a game-changer compared to years past, when updates on the Review Board date were sent through the mail.

Effortless New Hire Process

Once the application process is complete and an applicant receives an offer, the Sheriff’s Office uses Laserfiche to onboard new employees with digital forms. Laserfiche enables chain-of-command administration staff to sign off on specific files using conditions in a workflow. Relevant personnel say whether the file looks acceptable, and if so, it moves on to the next person. The process is smooth, accurate and far less time-consuming than the previous method of filling out a handwritten form as the official offer document with the salary and start date included.

The Sheriff’s Office’s Human Resources division is now a paperless environment thanks to implementing Laserfiche software. All employee personnel and medical files are stored in the repository and are easily accessible to HR staff. Additionally, Laserfiche has been integrated within the agency’s personnel management system. The software automatically pulls an employee’s information from the personnel management system, including his/her ID number, and completely fills out the template information—improving speed and accuracy.

“We like that information is accessible at our fingertips,” said Glasscock. “The training department now has one full-time staff assistant and a part-time student. They’re able to quickly find documents, email them to deputies if needed, and they’re easily viewed. Having those training files not in boxes anymore really helps them.”

The Sheriff’s Office also digitized the employee transfer form. Laserfiche automatically routes the form to the appropriate reviewer within the agency. The form has been further simplified by the use of variables, look-up tables (integrated with the organization’s computer-aided dispatch software and active directory), as well as field rules.

“Our recruiting department uses Laserfiche every day and a couple of agencies have reached out to me to see if we can share our process with them,” added Glasscock.

Since turning to Laserfiche, the Osceola County Sheriff’s Office has become more productive, effective and efficient. The agency digitized and secured more than 2,500 employee personnel files using Laserfiche software. Moreover, all new hire files are created digitally. The agency can process and prepare files for approval much faster, and automated email notifications mean that staff no longer need to call other departments as frequently to follow up on forms.

The agency realized an initial savings of $2,000 by eliminating supplies for new employee files, as well thousands more in departmental time-savings. Beyond cost savings, the Sheriff’s Office opened the door to a more digital, automated agency. By implementing innovative solutions like its Laserfiche digital records management program, the Osceola County Sheriff’s Office fosters a culture of efficiency and agility to better position the agency for success in a competitive hiring market.

AFP Crecer, El Salvador

My name is Carlos Ramos. I work for AFP Crecer as the digitalization manager.  AFP Crecer is one of El Salvador’s largest fund management firms.  We manage the pension funds for about 1.7 million affiliates. Our mission is to guide our clients as they save for an important life change: retirement. We’re working on growing their savings, so that when they retire, they’ll be able to continue providing for their family and themselves.

From a technological standpoint, the biggest challenges that we faced was having a document management system that would be flexible, that would allow us to have quality control for our stored information, and also streamline the digital capture processes to serve our customers in a more efficient manner through our channels. We evaluated several tools and Laserfiche was the one we liked the best.

Somehow, we discovered that document management goes beyond just digital archiving. We’re giving the opportunity to all of our client representatives to access information in a timely manner. Thanks to Laserfiche, as a tool, we’ve been able to change our processes. We were able to shorten processes that took five days to three days. We reduced processes that took 15 days to just five days.

Using the product has opened up additional improvement opportunities. It is not only about archiving digital documents, but also having the necessary documents throughout our key business processes. In addition, the use of electronic forms allowed us to reduce our use of paper. We were using around 650 packs of paper, which equals about 350,000 sheets of paper per year.

We’ve been working with Laserfiche for about 10 months and the experience has been fabulous. Now we have more visibility and we can do more complex searches and reports. Throughout our journey, we learned that things that we imagined and believed couldn’t be done with a software can be done with Laserfiche.

Time savings, reduction in costs, and an easier capture and digitization process. A client file took close to 100 days from its creation until it was ready for record archiving. Now it only takes two days for the client file to be archived. We get notifications if we made an error or notifications if image capture was successful.

With Laserfiche, and where I see future opportunities, such as analyzing our processes to identify those we can automate, what documents are required for those processes, and not only opportunities to automate them, but also to completely redesign them, and see how we’re doing things now and how we can do them tomorrow.

We must remember that we work and are dedicated to serve our clients’ needs. Financial needs with regards to pensions, and for them it’s very important to get speedy service, and that’s why Laserfiche has been a fundamental part of that.

City University, Hong Kong

City University of Hong Kong created a shared services platform for human resources and finance using Laserfiche.

St. Paul’s College, South Australia

Laserfiche helps St Paul’s College automate various student services, saving staff hundreds of hours per year to better focus on value-added activities for students.

My name is Neville Atkinson. I’m the Business Manager at St. Paul’s College. My main responsibility is the financial oversight of the college.

My name’s Ann Haywood and I’m the Assistant Business Manager at St. Paul’s College.

St. Paul’s College is a Reception to Year 12 Catholic boys’ school in the Edmund Rice tradition. We’re part of a Catholic network across Australia of 5,000 staff and we employ around 80 staff here at our College.

What motivates me to come to work every day is the opportunity to help both staff and students access private education when they may not normally be able to afford that. The key bottleneck that we face is the management of any collection of data.

With the introduction of the Royal Commission in Australia, a lot of our student records and staff records need to be kept forever, so previously our system was paper-based and we needed a new platform to be able to retrieve the information in a timely manner.

I first realized that Laserfiche was a good solution for our organization when we began some training, and that was generally because we began to see the potential that the software product had and how we could apply in our situation.

Some of our expectations and goals for Laserfiche were the storage management and retrieval of large amounts of information that we used to hold in paper files. We were also trying to achieve easy searchability and retrieval for those documents.

The other key things that we use Laserfiche for is electronic forms. We’ve automated a number of our forms which means that our staff are able to access those anytime, anywhere and we’ve got a consistent process.

The feedback we’ve had from users about the system that it’s easy to use, the searchability obviously is a great function, and just to have things at their fingertips has been fantastic.

The Laserfiche project has delivered a number of good return on investment outcomes, one of the key ones is that all of our data that we got from our parents used to be keyed in manually and we’ve now been able to automate that process. We estimate that saved us over 200 days of input from our staff.

I see our organization using Laserfiche in the future with integration with our current software product, as well as online forms and the implementation of accounts payable.

Yeah, we’re really excited about the opportunities of using Laserfiche going forward. We’re continuing looking at our systems and processes and we’re hoping by the middle of next year we’ll have all of our documents digitized.

Kensington Mortgages Automates Core Business Processes to Elevate Customer Experience

Kensington Mortgage Company implemented Laserfiche organization-wide and integrated it with multiple line-of-business applications.

My name is Farid Amin. I am a Solutions Architect at Kensington Mortgages. In my role I design, develop and implement to automate business processes across the operational areas using enterprise-level robotic and business process automation software tools.

Now in our 25th year, Kensington Mortgages is UK’s leading non-bank specialist mortgage provider and We manage over 11 billion pounds in assets. We have over 500 employees throughout the country, predominantly at our head office in Maidenhead.

In 2012, we needed to replace our aging document management system. It was becoming slow and unreliable. The core weakness of the system was that the historical documents were stored in a huge jukebox of some 250 optical discs run by a robotic arm and a subset of DVD drives.

As we grew, we had more documents to manage. We also had changing regulations, which meant we Needed access to those documents very, very quickly while we had customers on the phone. Therefore, we had to replace our system that would cater for our business needs.

Laserfiche fulfilled these requirements and we had foresight that its rich functionality of its various components could be utilized in other use cases and could be expanded across the business in later years. Today, we have over 56 million documents spanning over 7 terabytes of network storage.

We have 300 users that utilize Laserfiche day-in-day-out to serve and manage our accounts. The users’ feedback has been very positive. Laserfiche just runs in the background, unassumingly, and therefore as far as they’re concerned, it’s a system available all the time for them to carry out their work.

In 2016, we expanded the use of Laserfiche to business process automation and it has been a resounding success. Today we have business processes automated not just in servicing, but in finance and sales.

In 2019, we implemented our document online project. This has allowed our customers to view their documents online. We developed, in-house, a microservice using the Laserfiche SDK, which allows those customers to view their documents directly from the repository.

So here’s a system that has a use, but has got a whole lot of other tools that could benefit any organization. So Laserfiche has been in production for over 7 years and has provided service to us with stability and integrity.

Michael Hill Jeweler

By automating import and export documentation processes with Laserfiche, the jeweler more efficiently manages compliance with customs requirements.

My name is Joseph Colville. I work at Michael Hill International. We’re a middle market jeweler so we sell anything between nine-dollar studs and half a million-dollar pieces. The department I work for is the I.T. Department we deliver the Solutions for the whole business. My particular focus is on the distribution center and import export of all of our goods.

It was about two years ago that we decided that we needed to go down the automation route the bottlenecks and challenges that we had were especially around the mass handling of paper. There’s massive customs requirements and we needed a way to manage those in a more efficient manner. The process before Laserfiche was very manual. It involved building up files on your desk so goods come in. They would have the documents you’d have e-mails coming in you would print out those documents you would stick them in a file you would wait to that file has the correct amount of documents and then that would be archived and then the recall process of those documents , you would have to go to the right box find the right month, the right supplier and then pull out those documents and flick.

The expectations and goals that we had for Laserfiche was basically process automation, clear audit trail and fast document recall. So, these were absolutely essential dealing with. There’s very strict legislation to how we have to keep the documents. It varies between Jurisdictions and we needed to make sure we followed those to the letter. Now we’re not printing out every email that comes in. So, we’ve gone from printing two reams of paper a day to one ream a fortnight. We’ve also dropped the amount of time it takes to recall documents for customs. We have to recall a certain amount of lines go and find the physical documents and do checks. That process could take five minutes to find a doc. Now we can just do a simple search on it. So, there’s massive time saving there and we re-put that time saving into doing more checks to greater increase our compliance.

The most useful piece of advice I could give to future Laserfiche users would be lining up all the pieces, making sure right people are involved at the right time to ensure the project runs smoothly making sure they have access to get into your systems. And also ensuring that the business is heavily involved. So, you have your SMEs coming up and actually using the software. Well before you go live and feeding back the entire time. I’ve attended Laserfiche conferences, I’ve shared my story at those Laserfiche conferences and I’ve also heard stories of other people and being involved in training sessions and continuous improvement of the product. So that’s been really important and really key to our business.

Standard Bank Group

The South Africa bank’s fleet management division nearly eliminated manual tasks, more efficiently utilizing existing resources and exponentially growing its business.

My name is Justin Thomas. I work for Standard Bank Group it’s bank in Africa. I head up strategic alliances for Standard Bank fleet management as well as product development. Our bank is 150 years old so it’s got legacy platforms, legacy systems, it comes with a history that the journey we went on was essentially to look for systems that could support our growth and being able to support our customers in a manner that they expect.

Essentially what we did with Laserfiche was digitize the start to the end process. So, on receipt of a quotation all the way to sourcing a vehicle, providing a customer a quotation, to then disbursing the vehicle to the client. That entire process was Laserfiche essentially. We made sure that the whole distribution of work became a lot more structured. It was a lot more planned in terms of staff workforce capability and we saw immediate benefit in that particular spec, so we were losing mails and customers were complaining and that was no longer the case. Every mail was captured, every email was tracked, we could determine when it came in and when it was executed which gave us a lot of comfort in terms of the service we are offering to our customer.

Our business is also growing exponentially and one of the factors we’ve always been concerned about is the more we put scale on the more we have to resource accordingly. What the Laserfiche implementation has done is it has given us comfort that we can comfortably put more business on without having to increase resourcing commensurately. We are able to now use our existing resourcing in a much more efficient manner.

The advice I would give to a future Laserfiche users would be to have a purpose in mind in terms of what they want to achieve. Make sure you get the right people involved in your projects get people that that are open to a different approach and let them guide the process.

One of the things we realized is that the closer we could bring the Laserfiche guys to our particular business decision makers, the easier the sell, the easier the value was seen and then make sure that everybody has the vision, where this business is going to or where your business is going to.

I think the journey we are on with Laserfiche is something that is really going to transform our business.  It’s one element of what we’re busy with but it’s a big element. We are appreciative of that.

Sky Telecommunications Digitally Manages Employee Files and HR Processes

Serving 25,000 employees across the UK and Ireland, the telecommunications company’s HR department has sped up its processes and easily maintains its employee files.

My name is Nicola Doherty. I am the head of HR Administration at SKY. SKY are a media organization based in the UK and Ireland that provide direct home TV services for our customers. We have in the region of twenty-five thousand employees across the UK and Ireland and over 10 million customers. So, the HR admin function is responsible for, what it says on the tin really, HR administration for all of SKY’s employees.

We were taking back in-house some HR administration work that was previously delivered by a third party. For us to be able to do that. we had to look at, you know, how efficient we are in terms of our resources and our ability to deliver the service. So, it was at that point that we made the decision that we were going to upgrade the Laserfiche product that we had in place to Laserfiche Rio. We had a long-standing relationship with them with Laserfiche and through the conversations that we’d had with our sort-of partners we knew that there was more that we could get to enhance the product and its kind of ticked the boxes off of what we needed at that point in time of what we will need in the future. So, all of our employee files at Sky are held on the Laserfiche Rio product We use it to maintain, update employee files and to apply any rules that we need to arrange deletion for example.

We are a large organization that’s sort of diverse in terms of our structure and so that the Laserfiche product helps us to keep our sales organized. We use it for things like subject access requests that we get from employees. So, the new product has actually helped us with that process as well. For me, from an HR operations perspective, we never stand still so we’re always looking at better ways to do things. Whether that’s through automation or whether it’s just be more efficient at what we do. And, so I think Laserfiche as an organization it fits in with that.

The return that I see that we get from the Laserfiche product, the enhanced product, is that we are able to deliver our processes and quicker than we could before and that’s in relation to things such as subject access requests through new processes such as bar coding and in naming convention of files. There’s less human intervention in our processes so that the HR admin teams are able to file more and do it quickly and which is better than what we could do before.

The advice I would give to future Laserfiche users is and to keep things simple to give yourself enough time and to use the expertise that’s on offer. I think that the place it would end I was as always you know looking towards the future to see what other enhancements there might be further down the road. But we’ve got a really robust product in place now which is great.