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Nature Coast Women’s Care & Family Medicine developed an automated patient intake process using Laserfiche Cloud. As a tech-forward, comprehensive family healthcare center that offers a wide range of services — including obstetrics, gynecology, preventative services, aesthetic medicine and family medicine — Nature Coast modernized its patient experience using digital forms, and shortened patient wait times by 75%. Accelerating patient processing proved to be an especially significant benefit as COVID-19 arrived in the U.S. and it became more important to lessen the amount of time patients were in the waiting room.
Located in Tallahassee, Florida, Nature Coast Women’s Care & Family Medicine was started by Dr. Chukwuma M. Okoroji to advocate for patients’ health throughout all stages of their life. The practice prides itself on combining technology innovation with a proactive approach to patient care. The practice’s strategic planning led to the implementation of Laserfiche Cloud as a means to reimagine the patient intake process.
“Before using Laserfiche, our patients were instructed to come into the office early to fill out their new patient packet, and bring their license, insurance card — just all these pieces of paper,” said Tamearia Williams, practice administrator at Nature Coast Women’s Care & Family Medicine. “They’re filling out demographic information, financial information, etc. They would sit out in the lobby for about 10 to 15 minutes, sometimes longer, to fill out that paperwork.”
Once the front desk staff receives the paperwork, they check to make sure everything is complete and accurate before scanning the packet into the patient chart in the electronic medical record system. While the legacy process was similar to many other clinics’ patient intake process, the Nature Coast team saw opportunities for improvement. By digitizing the intake form, the clinic could reduce errors that may occur when patients fill the form out with a pen and paper, and ensure all necessary information is captured without having to return the form to the patient. Additionally, offering the ability to submit the form online would reduce wait times for all patients and streamline work for the practice.
The Nature Coast team worked with Business Automation Pros, a Laserfiche solution provider, to implement Laserfiche Cloud content management and realize their vision for a digital patient intake process.
“Nature Coast Women’s Care & Family Medicine is one of the few healthcare facilities in the region that has a digital patient intake process, which is a testament to the organization’s forward-thinking approach, and commitment to providing the best possible experience for patients,” said Ja’Baree Allen, president of Business Automation Pros. “We worked with the Nature Coast team to digitize the process just before COVID-19 arrived in the U.S. and stay-at-home orders began to take effect, enabling the clinic to continue caring for patients without missing a beat.”
Using Laserfiche, Nature Coast Women’s Care & Family Medicine replaced the in-person, manual process with an online form that patients can submit before even setting foot in the office.
Once the patient submits the intake packet online, the information is sent to the front desk team, who receive an email notification of the new patient. The information is pushed over to eClinicalWorks, the electronic health records system.
“Our front desk staff just needs to press a button and all the patient’s information is put into eClinicalWorks, which sets up the initial appointment,” Williams said. “There’s no wait time once they arrive. Laserfiche frees up a lot of time for staff and reduces the amount of time patients are in the office.”
For the team at Nature Coast, selecting a cloud-based content management system aligned well with the practice’s approach to technology. “We’re very tech driven here, so we like cloud-based everything,” Williams said. “We are in this office to treat our patients. So we need our technology to be top-of-the-line, all across the board. We need the ability to be remote, now more than ever. And no matter where we are, we need access to our files and our electronic medical records.”
The need to protect patient information also played a large role in the decision to implement Laserfiche Cloud.
“Being a healthcare organization, data security, HIPPAA and regulatory compliance plays a large role in our decision-making process,” Williams added. “Protecting patient information is just something that we know we must do on a day-to-day basis. Laserfiche offers the ability to see who can see what in what folders on a granular level, which is a big benefit. And Laserfiche records management is DoD-certified, which makes us feel very secure using the system and protecting the information that we are putting into the system.”
Since implementation, Nature Coast has received positive feedback from patients and staff about the new digital intake process. “Patients aren’t sitting out in the waiting room filling out paperwork, and there’s no longer the issue of forgotten driver’s licenses or insurance cards — they’ve already sent us the information we need,” Williams said. “Nothing is missed. They get here and check in, they’re seen, and then they’re on their way.” She estimates that they have shortened wait times for new patients by 75%.
Nature Coast Women’s Care & Family Medicine continues to build on the success of the new patient intake process. Human resources and financial are the next departments that will digitize records and processes, with plans to put the clinic’s job application online using Laserfiche Forms. As Nature Coast automates more of the clinic’s repetitive tasks, Williams also plans to take advantage of Laserfiche’s process analytics to help grow the practice.
“We’re hoping to increase our new patient volume,” Williams said. “Once we get more data, and more of the organization starts using Laserfiche, those analytics will be key.”
Find out how Laserfiche Cloud can transform how you do business. Experience Laserfiche Cloud today.
Document metadata is information assigned to a document to provide additional context. This metadata describes such characteristics as what the document is, who created it and when it was created.
Applying metadata to documents can help ensure information accuracy, simplify document search and retrieval, and automate business processes using an enterprise content management system.
Let’s take a deeper dive into what metadata is and the best practices for putting it to work in your organization.
A document’s metadata provides context that can help you better organize content. Additionally, search tools can usually read metadata much faster than a document’s full text, saving you time when searching.
Metadata holding document information can take on a variety of forms, including:
Fields store metadata about a document or folder. They can contain information including but not limited to words, lists, numbers, and dates.
Multi-value fields can be assigned multiple values at once. For example, someone may create a multi-value “author” field since some books may have multiple co-authors. Multi-value field groups enable someone to group together related fields. For example, you may group together “first name” and “last name” fields.
The most advanced cloud content management systems allow you to customize how fields are viewed to enhance the user experience. In addition, many systems offer the option to set fields as “required” so that users have to enter necessary metadata when creating or importing a new document.
A template is a group of document metadata fields. A template allows you to immediately apply a set of fields to a document, organized in a way that you want. Dynamic fields are useful when you want the list of options in one field of document metadata to depend on another. For example, a form on a government site may have a “county” field that depends on the “state” a user chooses.
Tags can be a quick way to classify and categorize documents. Informational tags provide additional notes on a document, while security tags can restrict access to only authorized users.
Flexible, reliable content management systems support document links – a type of metadata that associates a document with another. Two important document link types are:
Document relationships are useful whenever you want to be able to keep two documents associated with each other—especially if they are stored in different parts of your digital repository. For example, you might file email messages in a “Communications” folder by date or sender, but put the email attachments in other folders depending on their content. If you connected emails with their attachments using a document relationship, you could quickly find an attachment that goes with a particular email message no matter where in the repository the two documents are stored.
A link group is a collection of related documents, each with their own metadata, location, and other information. You can create a link group from any document, add or remove documents in the group, import documents into that group, or comment on documents in the group. Similar to document relationships, you can quickly access any of the documents in the group from any other document in the group.
Versions are useful for making reversible and trackable changes to documents. If you scan or save a document as a new version, the old version of the document remains intact in its version history, eliminating the risk of accidentally losing information by overwriting. In addition, a document’s version history allows you to see and compare the changes made in previous versions and to revert to a previous version, if necessary.
A digital signature is a way to indicate a document’s authenticity, confirming the signee’s identity, and providing a digital footprint that the signature itself has not been modified. For example, a manager can use a digital signature to indicate that he or she has approved a document. Later, a user can look up this signature to verify who signed it and if that signature was modified.
Document metadata is typically accessed by two parties in an organization: administrators, and users. Administrators have control over modifying types of metadata, permissions and rules (for example, making certain fields required when a user edits a document). Users may access metadata to update a search for and modify a document, or to organize a portion of the digital repository.
When establishing a system of metadata use within an organization, the administrator should set the following best practices:
As an administrator, it is a good idea to plan out the use of document metadata as early as possible.
Deliberately designing your metadata allows for a more structured, streamlined and intuitive system than adding metadata elements to your documents at will, which can result in duplicate fields and a cluttered environment.
For example, if you plan your fields ahead, you can create a single “Customer” field that can be used for all templates, which reduces the total number of fields a user must contend with and simplifies search and retrieval.
In contrast, if users create fields as they go, one user might create an “Invoice Customer” field and another user might create a “Customer Report” field, creating unneeded redundancy as both fields would contain customer names.
As a standard, you should use as few document metadata types as you can while still storing all the information you need. The more metadata elements you have in your repository, the more performance (i.e. speed of search) will be affected.
In many cases, a single metadata element can serve more than one purpose. For example, it’s not necessary to have five different “Vendor” fields just because you have five different templates. If all of those fields will contain a vendor name, you should create a single “Vendor” field and use it in all of the templates.
Certain kinds of information can be stored in more than one way, by more than one document metadata type. Occasionally, several metadata types will be equally suited to a task; however, in most cases, one type will be most appropriate. Consider how the information will be set and used, and choose the type most suited to the task.
Want to learn more about how digital document management can simplify business operations? Download the Document Management Software Buyer’s Guide.
Document management is a set of practices that define how an organization manages, stores and tracks its documents.
Documents come in a wide variety of formats, from contracts and forms to images and emails. However, whatever form documents take, the principles of document management stay consistent. The common components of document management include:
These components play an important role in securing your organization’s information. That’s why it is important to select the right tools and technologies to take full advantage of them. This is where a document management system comes in.
Organizations and teams increasingly rely on document management in order to conduct business. They are producing content at an ever-increasing rate, and today’s documents, now mostly digitized, stay around a lot longer than they did in the days of paper.
In fact, according to the Association for Intelligent Information Management (AIIM), “on average, organizations expect the volume of information coming into their organizations to grow from X to 4.5X over the next two years.” — © AIIM 2020
When unaddressed, these challenges can result in:
With information scattered between individuals and teams, documents can become missing, outdated, unsecured, and in a worst-case scenario, even compromised by an unauthorized party.
For example, employees could end up working with missing or incomplete information, hindering efficiency and productivity. For heavily regulated industries, unsecured documents can be a compliance risk, and consequently a financial liability. Compromised documents can present an even more serious security risk, creating the possibility of information falling into the wrong hands.
Learn how one university leveraged its document management system to better manage and protect the student and staff information it handles.
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Get insights from real customers on why Laserfiche is a top choice for organizations looking to expand their document management toolkit.
Compare top document management vendors on G2
Check out the G2 Grid® for Document Management and compare top vendors on the market.
Watch our webinar, ECM 101: An Introduction to Document Management Features
For an overview of how document management can help your organization streamline operations, watch our webinar, ECM 101: An Introduction to Document Management Features.
Explore Laserfiche document management
Visit our document management product page for a quick overview of available document management features within Laserfiche, and why customers trust Laserfiche as their document management solution.
Download The Document Management Software Buyer’s Guide
To learn more about the benefits and uses of document management, along with advice and insights on how to procure a system for your organization, download The Document Management Software Buyer’s Guide.
A document management system is designed to make it easier, and in many ways, automatic, for you to implement standard document management practices and procedures. By implementing a document management system, any organization can get their documents in order and take advantage of the following benefits:
• Increase transparency across the enterprise: Whether reviewing contracts, processing invoices or collecting forms, it’s essential that employees can find the right documents when they need them. A document management system puts documents all in one place, ensuring that employees are working with the same set of information. This centralized repository of critical documents can serve as a “source of truth” across the organization.
• Quickly search through multiple documents: Regardless of size and format, the right document management system can make every document full-text searchable. This enables employees to find the information they need, whether it’s in a document’s title, its metadata or deep within the full text. New technology such as artificial intelligence and machine learning can further enhance a document management system’s ability to extract information from documents.
• Securely share content internally and externally: It’s critical for many organizations to share documents with customers safely and securely. The right document management system can provide specialized functionality for this purpose, storing the document in a secure location, ensuring that it is shared for only a limited time, and enhancing transparency by logging who accessed what documents and when.
• Foster employee and organizational collaboration: When employees are working on a document together, advanced document management systems enable them to collaborate on a document in real-time. This process can be a boon in removing the back-and-forth of editing through email threads and getting final versions of documents out faster.
• Keep track of major revisions: Feature-rich document management systems have built-in version control. This helps employees track document changes and ensure that the document they’re working with is the most up-to-date version that exists.
• Protect sensitive information: With a document management system, administrators can grant or deny access to information as needed. This helps your organization ensure that documents can be accessed by authorized users and no one else.
• Support compliance efforts: Most document management systems provide audit trails – logs of system activity, including document edits, login attempts and user permission changes. This functionality helps to show auditors that your organization is following regulations and that system security measures are effective.
• Access information securely from anywhere with cloud document management: With today’s cloud technologies, employees can now access document management systems from wherever they are in the world. This ease of access, combined with the security that advanced document management systems can provide, offers a secure and effective way to ensure information can be communicated between project stakeholders, no matter where they are. Additionally, many cloud systems automatically back up content, providing a foundation for quick recovery in case of a disaster or disruption to business.
There are many ways a document management system can benefit organizations and improve their operations. In addition, as the digitization and adoption of cloud document management becomes more widespread, there are increasingly quick, efficient and secure ways of delivering this functionality to organizations.
The fast-changing economic landscape of the credit union industry has highlighted the importance for firms to leverage technology to meet customer needs.
Many credit unions that rely on legacy systems built around proprietary technology and manual processes have found it challenging to maintain and attract new members and stay ahead of the competition. Committed to putting its members first and continuously improving its service offerings, Dakotaland Federal Credit Union (“Dakotaland”) — a full-service, not-for-profit financial cooperative — has challenged the status quo, transforming traditional paper-based workflows to digitally transform its business. In 2004, the firm implemented a Laserfiche electronic document management system and has since expanded its use across its departments, while continuing to explore new ways to drive efficiency throughout the organization.
Dakotaland started with just 10 members in Huron, South Dakota, in 1935. In 2020, celebrating its 85th anniversary, the firm spans across 11 branches and serves nearly 40,000 members in 46 states. This growth further underscored the need to build more automated business processes in order to streamline information sharing and accelerate collaboration. “With Laserfiche, we can develop and assign tasks regardless of location, share that information easily across branches and automate notifications, and know exactly where we are in the process,” said Gina Hansen, vice president of product development at Dakotaland.
Additionally, increased regulatory burden, and a growing expectation of incorporating advanced technology solutions, have all presented opportunities for Dakotaland to acquire other small institutions to help these firms align their services with the evolving industry landscape. With the help of Laserfiche’s customizable technology solutions, Dakotaland has been able to continue providing the best possible service to its current member base while also growing its business.
Before implementing Laserfiche, Dakotaland’s information storage took the form of five rooms stacked with filing cabinets. The team realized it needed to store documents electronically to save space and avert document loss, while addressing recordkeeping requirements enforced by different regulatory bodies. These needs led Dakotaland to select Laserfiche for its robust electronic records management and automated workflow capabilities.
“Regulators and examiners expect us to document everything, requiring us to show proof of the firm’s work,” Hansen said. “Laserfiche helped us present all our data — including all mandatory details — in a format that leaves no room for error.”
The Laserfiche implementation enabled Dakotaland to digitize its records, while preserving record integrity and simplifying compliance processes. The efficiency driven by the Laserfiche initiative spurred the expansion of Laserfiche’s use in other projects aimed at improving the end-user experience and creating a stronger operational infrastructure across departments, including human resources, IT, insurance, mortgage, and more.
“Today, we heavily rely on Laserfiche for almost all our day-to-day operations, automating nearly 250 running workflows and almost 100 active forms processes,” Hansen said. “I do not believe there is any part of our organization that is not using Laserfiche in some capacity. While some forms and workflows are simple routing to logically file documents, others are utilizing the report feature to provide tracking ability, and some automate more complex processes such as our new hire or vendor management tracking process.”
While all departments within Dakotaland use Laserfiche in some shape or form, one department that has harnessed the great values of digital transformation is human resources.
Multiple teams across different departments are impacted whenever an employee is hired or terminated, or moves to a new department. To keep employees and teams informed, Dakotaland used Laserfiche to create an end-to-end solution to process employee and candidate records, and combat information loss. The platform streamlines the workflow through a new-hire checklist, comprising of analyzing applications, processing forms, sharing the database with the supervisors, helping them classify the applications, and developing a comprehensive pool of interview candidates. By automating the HR processes, the firm is able to save countless hours — allowing teams across a multitude of departments to focus on more client-facing services that require a human touch.
Most recently, the firm also used Laserfiche to automate a key process for its now-virtual Employee Enrichment Day — a team-building program, where the firm engages in activities that enhance staff connection and give employees an opportunity to learn about each other. During this day, the team works on a spotlight commemoration developed and assigned to the staff in Laserfiche Forms with questions directed to the respective personalities of the employees. The answers then develop a quiz that goes back to all employees, and within that process, the team uses Forms to analyze and file the answers. Automating the process with Laserfiche saves the firm around 10 to 15 hours, analyzing the scores of more than 160 employees in one day.
COVID-19 has compelled firms across different industries to challenge their technological capacities and reevaluate their resources. When the pandemic first hit, more than 30 team members at Dakotaland were deployed to work remotely within a week — enabling the firm to fully rely on its digital repository of data and its automated workflows. The seamless transition enforced business continuity at Dakotaland, allowing for uninterrupted services to its members, even in an unpredictable environment.
One of the biggest hurdles to adopting a new system can be identifying areas that need improvement and processes that can be streamlined. The management at Dakotaland takes pride in driving a thorough observation across the firm to determine loopholes and encourage innovation that can help avoid system failures and boost operational competency. With support from the executive team, the firm leverages its Laserfiche champions, who lead the technology shift across different teams and help them adopt new solutions. These champions play a critical role in training employees about the new processes and identifying unique ways in which Laserfiche can be customized to further enhance productivity and maximize the firm’s investment in Laserfiche technology.
“There are always new challenges and concerns that the credit union industry has to address,” Hansen said. “However, our confidence in Laserfiche’s capacity has encouraged us to identify and resolve any technology challenges upfront and continue to enhance our competitive edge in the industry. I am excited to see what innovation is in store for our collaboration and how we can collectively revolutionize the credit union space.”
