The Problem
Health Departments in Florida have a long history dating back to 1889 with the formation of the Florida State Board of Health. It wasn’t until 1930 when we would see the first County Health Department organized. The role of County Health Departments today is to promote and protect the health and safety of all Floridians.
To accomplish this, each County Health Department is comprised of several administrative departments and divisions operating as a business including departments such as Purchasing, Business Office, Human Resources, Information Technology, etc.
The Solution
Laserfiche was initially implemented in the Business Office and easily expanded into several other offices and departments as well. Since then, they have been able to eliminate the costs associated with offsite storage and the purchase of filing supplies such as file cabinets, file folders and binders. They have even been able to lower their postage and shipping costs by emailing document straight from Laserfiche, when documents are required to be submitted to Tallahassee offices for auditing purposes.
In addition, several large lateral file cabinets have been emptied, freeing up more space for staff.
To date the County Health Department has continued to save time and money by reducing the need to manually file research and store their records.
Their future goal is to experience similar results as they roll out the system to more of their programs and departments going forward.
As with running any business there will be challenges to face along the way. For one County Health Department the statutory requirement to retain paper documents were presenting a huge challenge in terms of accessibility and storage. Office space was in limited supply and the growing number of paper records was consuming much of that space.
Boxes upon boxes were stacked in offices spaces, hallways and stored in offsite facilities making it difficult, time-consuming and costly to research and locate records as they were needed. To help overcome these challenges the County Health Department turned to MCCi and Laserfiche for help. The administrative assistant in the business office explained that, “prior to the implementation of Laserfiche, turnaround time for a record request was one to two business days.”
Many times the case files being requested were stored in offsite storage facilities. This meant they had to request the records, wait for delivery, manually locate the record, make copies, mail out the copies, and then return the originals to the offsite storage facility.
