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Non-Profit Agency Made More Efficient By Someone Who

Knows the Value of Efficiency

At Arkansas Support Network, Laserfiche is synonymous with case management—and one user’s remarkable career

July 19th, 2010 by Hobey Echlin Comment on this article

“Like all non-profit organizations, we continue to be asked to ‘do more with less,’” says Dr. Keith Vire, CEO of the Arkansas Support Network (ASN). Since adopting Laserfiche as its case management system in 2008, Laserfiche has helped do just that by supporting ASN’s 430 staff, program managers and case managers as they provide services and supported employment to over 800 individuals and families with disabilities. Client files that were once three-inch thick folders of medical information, case notes and support plans are now indexed and searchable—visible only to assigned staff, making compliance and frequent audits by multiple state and federal healthcare agencies simple and comprehensive.

No one at ASN knows the value of simple and comprehensive—and doing more with less, for that matter—than Martin Lovelace-Chandler, ASN’s information management specialist and Laserfiche administrator.

Martin Lovelace-Chandler's Laserfiche workstation

Born with a form of cerebral palsy that limits his motor skills and speech, Lovelace-Chandler has embraced technology with a purpose and passion in his life and career—at least as much as the technology has been able to keep up with the ambitions of the now-married father of two. “In college [in the late ‘90s], I really wanted to go into computers but I didn’t have a way to type or to use a mouse,” he says. After Lovelace-Chandler became an ASN client a decade ago, Dr. Vire had a great idea: to make ASN’s client files accessible to staff by scanning cumbersome paper files to disc. “It was just costing the agency storage every month. He asked me if I could help. I told him I can do anything on a computer if he just gets me the right equipment,” Lovelace-Chandler remembers.

The “right equipment” has changed a lot over the years. Realizing it needed a network solution to make scanned information more easily accessible to staff, ASN implemented a Canofile imaging system in 2006, but quickly found it fell short of its promise. Lack of indexing and usability meant ASN’s 20-plus case managers were still using three-inch thick paper files—sometimes three or four of them per client—which were time-consuming to locate and use and even more resource-consuming when it came to storage and auditing. It was “nightmare-ish stuff,” as Dr. Vire remembers. The one bright spot was that Lovelace-Chandler started using a combination keyboard and mouse that allowed him to program hotkey shortcuts—“macros and micros,” he calls them—that cut the keystrokes required to open up programs like Canonfile from 10 to two. “This allowed me to spend more time on the program itself and gave me total independence,” he says.

Over time, just as Lovelace-Chandler upgraded his communication device to a simpler and more comprehensive “Eco 14” model, ASN likewise upgraded to Laserfiche in 2008. The reason was twofold: “We wanted to be able to have all current and past files on Laserfiche so then it would be at everyone in the agency’s fingertips,” Lovelace-Chandler says. “We also wanted a program that would have a higher security feature after the HIPAA law went into effect.”

Although Dr. Vire admits that system adoption initially took time—not everyone was as attuned to the benefits of using technology as Lovelace-Chandler—the impact has been real.

“There was a time when, if we had a question about an individual’s plan from last year, we had to send someone to a storage unit and hope they could find the correct file, and then hope that the information was in the correct place. We almost always found the document, but the time invested was huge. We can now find that document in minutes rather than hours—and we’ve never had a water leak that left our Laserfiche files water-logged and unusable,” he says. “Laserfiche is definitely a time and money saver.”

For Lovelace-Chandler, a key benefit is how easily he can set up and administer ASN’s Laserfiche system for the case managers who use it on a daily basis. In addition to processing the 200 or so documents generated in the field every day, Lovelace-Chandler has added indexes for medical history, case manager notes and program plans, among other documents. “I’m able to use drop down lists for 98% of the fields,” he says. “It allows documents to be located faster and more efficiently.” And, he adds, securely.

“Laserfiche allows me to give only the people that should be seeing a certain region access. So for example, a case manager might have several consumers out of several regions, but that case manager only has access to each consumer that they are assigned—it’s a lot easier to them to access, and I love that security is set up differently,” he explains. “On Canofile any person could look up any consumer and see all their files. Now, with Laserfiche, I can assign that consumer just to who actually needs access. We also set up groups for each department. For example, Human Resources can’t access supported living files and vice-versa. We really like this because we can track who all is accessing all the files.”

He particularly likes Laserfiche’s support for Window Active Directory. “Almost every day I use the multi-media function to add employee names to the list.”

Another area of improvement has been auditing. As a healthcare services provider with funding and oversight from state and national agencies including the Department of Health and Human Services (which monitors HIPAA compliance), the Arkansas Department of Human Services and the Division of Developmental Disabilities Services, ASN is subject to frequent audits—as many as four per year. “We had an agency that told us that we had so many days to find documents or our agency would be fined. I was able to look up and send them every document they wanted. I would have spent twice the amount of time looking for the documents if we were still using Canofile,” Lovelace-Chandler says.

In addition to using Laserfiche for case management, Lovelace-Chandler also uses it to manage payroll, HR and AP processing. The plan, says Kevin Dickinson of ASN’s Laserfiche reseller, Preferred Office Products, is to implement Quick Fields, possibly even equipping case managers with netbooks to directly input their notes, freeing up Lovelace-Chandler’s time.

“I feel that having Laserfiche we will be able to do bigger and better things in the future. I also feel that it will help us greatly since our agency continues to expand,” says Lovelace-Chandler.

“I have been able to use Laserfiche more than any other program. With the features of Laserfiche it is an easier process to program my device and to use all the features that the program offers. I feel like Laserfiche could open a lot of doors for me or even people like me that have a physical disability,” he adds.

www.laserfiche.com/news/archives/2010/07/19/non-profit-agency-made-more-efficient-by-someone-who-knows-the-value-of-efficiency/