Valley Mountain Regional Center
How Laserfiche is helping Improve Customer Care
Valley Mountain Regional Center (VMRC) is a private, non-profit corporation that contracts with the State of California to provide diagnostic, evaluation, case management and early intervention services to people “consumers” with developmental disabilities. Located in the Stockton, CA the VMRC services the counties of Amador, Calaveras, San Joaquin, Stanislaus and Tuolumne with a general population in all five counties of 1,338,793. Over 55% of the corporation’s consumers are based out of San Joaquin County.
The VMRC has had Laserfiche Content Management since 2008. As a social service agency, they have staff including approximately 130 Service Coordinators serving approximately 11,000 consumers with developmental disabilities from across their region. VMRC began their Laserfiche implementation with a goal to be virtually paperless and institute a system of processes and procedures to maximize efficiency for the Regional Center. With 11,000 consumers served by the Regional Center, and 900+ page documents per consumer in mass volumes, VMRC is looking to shift the corporation’s attention away from overly-saturated administrative processes to allow Service Coordinators to spend more time meeting the needs of their consumers.
It was this guiding principle which first set the realization that document management implementation was needed to ensure that the Regional Center’s time and attention were focused on their consumers. In order to accomplish this goal, VMRC wanted to give their Service Coordinators the ability to access records and update its contents from the field without having to manually retrieve documents in the massive paper silos previously seen before the implementation. VMRC has leveraged COLD imaging to take their documentation from their AS400 computer to Laserfiche instantly without the need for printing and scanning their documentation. Currently, the Regional Center has all consumer files in Laserfiche and are employing 12 scanners dedicated to record-keeping all paper documentation into Laserfiche. This system has saved Service Coordinators nearly 3 hours per consumer per month, and with 11,000 consumers, that is 30,000 man hours recouped and reallocated to consumer care.
The Regional Center’s immediate goals for their Laserfiche implementation are:
- Eliminate chronic disk-space limitations for new content
- Move to a new server infrastructure to support a more highly-available system
- Develop a comprehensive disaster recovery plan
As for the long-term goals for the corporation, VMRC hopes that over the next years they will be able to:
- Provide a consistent and stable user experience for scanning and retrieving records
- Maintain user access through Thin versus Thick Clients
- Ensure the records are being stored in accordance with VMRC records policies
- Ensure that using the digital records as the legal originals holds up to DDS audit
- Provide user-training and consulting to ensure that the system is being used to its full capability
Due to HIPAA regulations (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act) – which protects the privacy of individually identifiable health information – the VMRC must take certain provisions to ensure that these regulations are adhered to. Laserfiche assists to facilitate this process with the security and permissions functionalities along with the auditing capabilities available through Laserfiche. The VMRC works to take every precautionary measure to meet all state and federally-mandated regulations. Laserfiche has been instrumental in ensuring this.
In January 2012, ECS Imaging was chosen as the VAR to help VMRC move forward in their document management goals and get the system updated to version 8.3. ECS provided a detailed analysis of the existing system, along with a statement of work to improve their existing system and to meet the current and future needs of VMRC.
ECS has worked effortlessly at ensuring that the project goals and implementation plans were met with efficiency and expediency. In fact, the recommendation for ECS Imaging, Inc. as the Laserfiche VAR of choice came to the VMRC from another one of our customers at Diamond Foods, Inc. who have also experienced exemplary services with ECS Imaging, Inc. and Laserfiche document management software.
Just like ECS Imaging, Inc. ensures with its customers, the Valley Mountain Regional Center has done all it can in taking necessary and diligent steps at establishing processes that will maximize their abilities to service their consumers with quality, care, and minimal error.
