April 1999
Small Government Agencies Solve Big Problems
Building solutions at the state and local level can involve tight budgets and steep training curves. Hereýs how governments in New York, New Hampshire, Los Angeles and Oregon went digital.
Managing information is at the heart of what local and state governments do. These agencies not only track the crucial events of our lives -- births, deaths, marriages, property ownership -- they deliver services and make policy decisions based on that information.
The volume and complexity of the data increases, but not, generally, the budget and personnel needed to handle it--and no funding authority can provide more hours in the day. The cases below demonstrate how document management and imaging technologies--forms processing, bar coding, Web publishing, electronic document management and record keeping--can leverage fixed resources so that government agencies can get ahead of the game.
NY County Migrates
From Fiche to Web
The Erie County, NY, Department of Social Services faced a technology crisis when they were notified that the film for their microfiche system was due to go out of production at the end of 1996. ýWe had to scurry around to replace this system without getting back to paper again,ý says Jack King, assistant commissioner for systems development.
Returning to paper would have been disastrous for DSS. The agencyýs 800 case workers see more than 400,000 new items every month in the course of administering welfare, foodstamps and other family services. They needed to manage a huge and constantly changing body of paper and electronic documents, but the challenges they faced were less technical than organizational.
Only about 20% of DSS workers had ever used a PC, so user-friendliness and training were high on the list of requirements. In fact, one vendor was rejected immediately because their presentation was pitched over the heads of the audience of potential users. The winning VAR, AOP Solutions of Buffalo, NY, was chosen partly because their demonstration addressed issues, directly and concretely.
The solution they settled on combines OnBase document/image management from Hyland Software (Rocky River, OH) and Taskmaster capture/forms processing software from Datacap (White Plains, NY). Hardware includes RAID and optical storage, two Kodak 9500 scanners for main intake and two Fujitsu 3096s for rescanning. The pilot project included teams representing every area that would use the system, and the pilot teams worked for a couple months before implementing whole areas.
ýWe did it in four major waves,ý says King. ýWe didnýt want to turn 800 people on all at once.ý
The completed system comprises 425 seats (800 users sharing stations) at ten sites. Although they had anticipated saving money, King says overhead costs have proved to be the same as for microfiche. They have seen some savings in areas such as photocopying, supplies and staff time, but the biggest benefit has been dramatically increased speed and efficiency of operation.
For example, where it took 30-45 days to convert paper into microfiche, the imaging systemýs turnaround is four to five days. Microfiche also had to be manually distributed and refiled (at the rate of 180 cases per worker). Every file update meant a new fiche (and often redundant documents). Even with multiple copies of each fiche available, there was always a backlog of unanswered requests for files. Now the records are more up-to-date and accurate, and they are immediately accessible across the whole department.
ýOur QC rate is better because weýre not missing documents,ý says King. ýItýs a boon for fraud control and quality assurance. They get their jobs done much more quickly because they donýt have to wait around for records. Now they can send referrals electronically from building to building, room to room, staff to staff, without filling out forms, putting them in the interoffice mail, waiting to go to the employment division thatýs three blocks down the street. They can put it on the system and send it through the network.ý
Speed counts for a lot. With the old fiche system, a request for information meant submitting a request to the records room and waiting five to ten days for results, according to project manager Sandra Hoffman.
ý[Now we can] reply in about three minutes, saving the time of sending paperwork down and back up through the chain of command to get a simple question answered,ý says Hoffman.
New Hampshire Redefines ýLegacyý Conversion
The New Hampshire Bureau of Vital Records oversees more than three centuriesý worth of information reaching back to the colonial period. Last year, they took a giant step toward all-electronic (and eventually paperless) record-keeping with the Vital Record Vision 2000 system, a custom-designed application that tracks birth, death, marriage, and divorce records.
VRV 2000 locates its data-entry points where the information originates: in city and town clerkýs offices, hospitals and funeral homes. Since June of 1998, 21 remote sites plus the central state office have deployed the application, and rollout to 112 additional city and town clerks, 17 hospitals and 50 funeral homes is planned for this year.
Once an item is in the system, any records office in the state can issue a certified copy of the birth, death or marriage certificate. Remote connection is either direct-dial or over the Internet via IP tunneling. For the offices that have not yet installed VRV 2000, the central state office handles entry into the electronic system.
In fact, state registrar Karen Grady does not anticipate a totally paperless operation for ýquite some time.ý A death certificate, for example, involves a doctor or hospital as well as a funeral director.
ýThe death registration process is pretty complex,ý she says. ý[The system] was designed so that we can handle a portion of [a process] on paper if we have to.ý
The biggest paper volume, though, resides in the stateýs archive of 3 million records dating from the 1600s to 1947. (Post-1947 records were keyed into the electronic system as part of the VRV project.)
Archival records are to be accessed through an imaging application, which constitutes a relatively small part of VRV 2000. Mantech, the Towson, MD-based VAR that wrote the main application, put together a solution harnessing Open Imaging Software from Eastman Software (Billerica, MA).
Around the turn of the last century, the original ledgers were transcribed onto standard four-by-eight cards. The aim of the imaging sub-project, says Grady, is to scan and index the cards and add the index information to the central database.
ýWhen a customer requests a certified copy, it will be seamless to bring up a [pre-1947] imaged record an [post-1947] electronic record,ý she says.
The imaging project will also have the effect of straightening out their old records. ýThe indexing scheme used to file the cards was based on the first and third letter of the last name,ý Grady explains, guessing that this approach was designed to accommodate foreign surnames such as McArdle or DiAngelo. ýTo this day, theyýre stored in that order, and to try to re-alphabetize them and sort them would be a massive project that we donýt have the staff for.ý
VRV 2000 has already resulted in dramatic gains in service speed and efficiency. The manual method of issuing a certified copy, says Grady, was ýquite an involved, tedious process. Now they go to the system, press the ýprintý button and itýs done.ý
Improvements in behind-the-scenes operation are even greater. ýWeýre required to submit data to several federal agencies,ý Grady says, ýand weýre required to do some further coding and analysis on the data that we collect, and that has been streamlined. Where it used to take us hours to do that processing, now it takes a couple of minutes and the click of a button.ý
Grady says that when everything was strictly manual, statewide data analyses lagged 24 months behind and approximately 17 percent of records required follow-up because things werenýt completed or were completed inaccurately. Now with electronic registration, cross-record analyses take six months and only one percent of records require follow-up.
Oregon County Speeds Access to Vital Records
The Vital Records Office in Deschutes County, Oregon, is making the move from microfilm to imaging, and expects to leapfrog onto the Internet within months. The state archivist currently mandates microfilm for permanent storage, but county network administrator Joe Sadony sees the migration to digital archives as inevitable.
One obvious reason to adopt digital technology is to speed retrieval. Microfilm is still usable, but itýs not fast enough, Sadony says, and many customers need assistance with the film readers.
The agencyýs initial goal was to replace microfilm with PCs, and they chose a scanning and retrieval engine from LaserFiche in Torrence, CA. With the imaging system, clerks record the date and a few fields of information for each new document. A cover sheet with a document-number barcode is printed, and this cover sheet is scanned as the first page of every document. The barcode document number is the link between the image-retrieval application and the countyýs existing database.
The departmentýs own programmers are writing most of the supporting applications. Since their first-stage goal has been to replace the microfilm camera with the scanning process, much of their old document-indexing procedure (running on a Pick database environment running on an RS-6000) remains the same.
ýThe barcode will only populate the [LaserFiche] document number field,ý Sadony explains. ýWeýre writing a custom application that will take information from our Pick database and populate the other fields. This will give us a little more information to search on.ý
Fast and trouble-fee retrieval is a key to pleasing not only the occasional public user but also the departmentýs regular business customers in real estate and law. It also points the way to a fee-based service the department can offer in the future.
ýTitle companies are installing imaging right and left,ý says Sadony, ýand they want their images. They bring in the documents, we scan them . . . and they will buy back the images from us and import them into their systems. Weýre trying to automate the whole thing so that all that the operator in the clerkýs office has to do is scan the document, make sure that itýs right side up and all the pages are there and be done with them.ý
The next step is to make the records system internet-accessible via LaserFicheýs WebLink server software.
ýWeýre writing our own custom CGI interface to the indexes on the RS-6000,ý Sadony says. ýUsers will be able to go in via a Web page and search our indexes. The search will produce the information about the documents and links to the documents stored on the LaserFiche system.ý
The county can now get rid of its microfilm hardware and have archival film produced from electronic images by a service bureau. According to Sadony, itýs not the cost savings that make the imaging system so attractive. ýIn the end, the accessibility to the information and the service will be enhanced,ý he explains. ýItýs hard to put a dollar figure on it, but itýs something that everybody agrees will help them in their business processes.ý
Los Angeles Cuts Transit Fraud
The Los Angeles Department of Transportation (LADOT) administers the $20-million-a-year CityRide program, which provides subsidized transportation for the elderly, the disabled and Medi-Cal clients. Users are issued scrip books with a supply of one-dollar coupons good for travel by taxi, bus or van. When irregularities emerged, LADOT started looking into ways to eliminate possible fraud.
ýThe area of main concern was the taxicab providers,ý says John Afford, LADOTýs chief accountant.
The problem was how to reconcile the cab company invoices with the various supporting documents (driver trip forms, client scrip and company waybills) to assure legitimate payments within the thirty days called for by the contracts. LADOT needed to do quick-response audits that would catch errors and omissions before the invoices were paid. Given the amount of paper--more than 100,000 trip forms alone each month--and the amount of data each form that needed to be checked and verified, there was neither staff nor space to do the reconciliation in a timely manner.
ýOur pre-audit manual process was inadequate,ý Afford says. ýWe werenýt getting compliance for the program. We couldnýt process all the forms and do all the checks without technology.ý
Working with value added reseller Fax Masters of Santa Ana, CA, LADOT developed an automated imaging/forms processing solution. Teleform Elite from
Managing information is at the heart of what local and state governments do. These agencies not only track the crucial events of our lives -- births, deaths, marriages, property ownership -- they deliver services and make policy decisions based on that information.
The volume and complexity of the data increases, but not, generally, the budget and personnel needed to handle it--and no funding authority can provide more hours in the day. The cases below demonstrate how document management and imaging technologies--forms processing, bar coding, Web publishing, electronic document management and record keeping--can leverage fixed resources so that government agencies can get ahead of the game.
NY County Migrates
From Fiche to Web
The Erie County, NY, Department of Social Services faced a technology crisis when they were notified that the film for their microfiche system was due to go out of production at the end of 1996. ýWe had to scurry around to replace this system without getting back to paper again,ý says Jack King, assistant commissioner for systems development.
Returning to paper would have been disastrous for DSS. The agencyýs 800 case workers see more than 400,000 new items every month in the course of administering welfare, foodstamps and other family services. They needed to manage a huge and constantly changing body of paper and electronic documents, but the challenges they faced were less technical than organizational.
Only about 20% of DSS workers had ever used a PC, so user-friendliness and training were high on the list of requirements. In fact, one vendor was rejected immediately because their presentation was pitched over the heads of the audience of potential users. The winning VAR, AOP Solutions of Buffalo, NY, was chosen partly because their demonstration addressed issues, directly and concretely.
The solution they settled on combines OnBase document/image management from Hyland Software (Rocky River, OH) and Taskmaster capture/forms processing software from Datacap (White Plains, NY). Hardware includes RAID and optical storage, two Kodak 9500 scanners for main intake and two Fujitsu 3096s for rescanning. The pilot project included teams representing every area that would use the system, and the pilot teams worked for a couple months before implementing whole areas.
ýWe did it in four major waves,ý says King. ýWe didnýt want to turn 800 people on all at once.ý
The completed system comprises 425 seats (800 users sharing stations) at ten sites. Although they had anticipated saving money, King says overhead costs have proved to be the same as for microfiche. They have seen some savings in areas such as photocopying, supplies and staff time, but the biggest benefit has been dramatically increased speed and efficiency of operation.
For example, where it took 30-45 days to convert paper into microfiche, the imaging systemýs turnaround is four to five days. Microfiche also had to be manually distributed and refiled (at the rate of 180 cases per worker). Every file update meant a new fiche (and often redundant documents). Even with multiple copies of each fiche available, there was always a backlog of unanswered requests for files. Now the records are more up-to-date and accurate, and they are immediately accessible across the whole department.
ýOur QC rate is better because weýre not missing documents,ý says King. ýItýs a boon for fraud control and quality assurance. They get their jobs done much more quickly because they donýt have to wait around for records. Now they can send referrals electronically from building to building, room to room, staff to staff, without filling out forms, putting them in the interoffice mail, waiting to go to the employment division thatýs three blocks down the street. They can put it on the system and send it through the network.ý
Speed counts for a lot. With the old fiche system, a request for information meant submitting a request to the records room and waiting five to ten days for results, according to project manager Sandra Hoffman.
ý[Now we can] reply in about three minutes, saving the time of sending paperwork down and back up through the chain of command to get a simple question answered,ý says Hoffman.
New Hampshire Redefines ýLegacyý Conversion
The New Hampshire Bureau of Vital Records oversees more than three centuriesý worth of information reaching back to the colonial period. Last year, they took a giant step toward all-electronic (and eventually paperless) record-keeping with the Vital Record Vision 2000 system, a custom-designed application that tracks birth, death, marriage, and divorce records.
VRV 2000 locates its data-entry points where the information originates: in city and town clerkýs offices, hospitals and funeral homes. Since June of 1998, 21 remote sites plus the central state office have deployed the application, and rollout to 112 additional city and town clerks, 17 hospitals and 50 funeral homes is planned for this year.
Once an item is in the system, any records office in the state can issue a certified copy of the birth, death or marriage certificate. Remote connection is either direct-dial or over the Internet via IP tunneling. For the offices that have not yet installed VRV 2000, the central state office handles entry into the electronic system.
In fact, state registrar Karen Grady does not anticipate a totally paperless operation for ýquite some time.ý A death certificate, for example, involves a doctor or hospital as well as a funeral director.
ýThe death registration process is pretty complex,ý she says. ý[The system] was designed so that we can handle a portion of [a process] on paper if we have to.ý
The biggest paper volume, though, resides in the stateýs archive of 3 million records dating from the 1600s to 1947. (Post-1947 records were keyed into the electronic system as part of the VRV project.)
Archival records are to be accessed through an imaging application, which constitutes a relatively small part of VRV 2000. Mantech, the Towson, MD-based VAR that wrote the main application, put together a solution harnessing Open Imaging Software from Eastman Software (Billerica, MA).
Around the turn of the last century, the original ledgers were transcribed onto standard four-by-eight cards. The aim of the imaging sub-project, says Grady, is to scan and index the cards and add the index information to the central database.
ýWhen a customer requests a certified copy, it will be seamless to bring up a [pre-1947] imaged record an [post-1947] electronic record,ý she says.
The imaging project will also have the effect of straightening out their old records. ýThe indexing scheme used to file the cards was based on the first and third letter of the last name,ý Grady explains, guessing that this approach was designed to accommodate foreign surnames such as McArdle or DiAngelo. ýTo this day, theyýre stored in that order, and to try to re-alphabetize them and sort them would be a massive project that we donýt have the staff for.ý
VRV 2000 has already resulted in dramatic gains in service speed and efficiency. The manual method of issuing a certified copy, says Grady, was ýquite an involved, tedious process. Now they go to the system, press the ýprintý button and itýs done.ý
Improvements in behind-the-scenes operation are even greater. ýWeýre required to submit data to several federal agencies,ý Grady says, ýand weýre required to do some further coding and analysis on the data that we collect, and that has been streamlined. Where it used to take us hours to do that processing, now it takes a couple of minutes and the click of a button.ý
Grady says that when everything was strictly manual, statewide data analyses lagged 24 months behind and approximately 17 percent of records required follow-up because things werenýt completed or were completed inaccurately. Now with electronic registration, cross-record analyses take six months and only one percent of records require follow-up.
Oregon County Speeds Access to Vital Records
The Vital Records Office in Deschutes County, Oregon, is making the move from microfilm to imaging, and expects to leapfrog onto the Internet within months. The state archivist currently mandates microfilm for permanent storage, but county network administrator Joe Sadony sees the migration to digital archives as inevitable.
One obvious reason to adopt digital technology is to speed retrieval. Microfilm is still usable, but itýs not fast enough, Sadony says, and many customers need assistance with the film readers.
The agencyýs initial goal was to replace microfilm with PCs, and they chose a scanning and retrieval engine from LaserFiche in Torrence, CA. With the imaging system, clerks record the date and a few fields of information for each new document. A cover sheet with a document-number barcode is printed, and this cover sheet is scanned as the first page of every document. The barcode document number is the link between the image-retrieval application and the countyýs existing database.
The departmentýs own programmers are writing most of the supporting applications. Since their first-stage goal has been to replace the microfilm camera with the scanning process, much of their old document-indexing procedure (running on a Pick database environment running on an RS-6000) remains the same.
ýThe barcode will only populate the [LaserFiche] document number field,ý Sadony explains. ýWeýre writing a custom application that will take information from our Pick database and populate the other fields. This will give us a little more information to search on.ý
Fast and trouble-fee retrieval is a key to pleasing not only the occasional public user but also the departmentýs regular business customers in real estate and law. It also points the way to a fee-based service the department can offer in the future.
ýTitle companies are installing imaging right and left,ý says Sadony, ýand they want their images. They bring in the documents, we scan them . . . and they will buy back the images from us and import them into their systems. Weýre trying to automate the whole thing so that all that the operator in the clerkýs office has to do is scan the document, make sure that itýs right side up and all the pages are there and be done with them.ý
The next step is to make the records system internet-accessible via LaserFicheýs WebLink server software.
ýWeýre writing our own custom CGI interface to the indexes on the RS-6000,ý Sadony says. ýUsers will be able to go in via a Web page and search our indexes. The search will produce the information about the documents and links to the documents stored on the LaserFiche system.ý
The county can now get rid of its microfilm hardware and have archival film produced from electronic images by a service bureau. According to Sadony, itýs not the cost savings that make the imaging system so attractive. ýIn the end, the accessibility to the information and the service will be enhanced,ý he explains. ýItýs hard to put a dollar figure on it, but itýs something that everybody agrees will help them in their business processes.ý
Los Angeles Cuts
Transit Fraud
The Los Angeles Department of Transportation (LADOT) administers the $20-million-a-year CityRide program, which provides subsidized transportation for the elderly, the disabled and Medi-Cal clients. Users are issued scrip books with a supply of one-dollar coupons good for travel by taxi, bus or van. When irregularities emerged, LADOT started looking into ways to eliminate possible fraud.
ýThe area of main concern was the taxicab providers,ý says John Afford, LADOTýs chief accountant.
The problem was how to reconcile the cab company invoices with the various supporting documents (driver trip forms, client scrip and company waybills) to assure legitimate payments within the thirty days called for by the contracts. LADOT needed to do quick-response audits that would catch errors and omissions before the invoices were paid. Given the amount of paper--more than 100,000 trip forms alone each month--and the amount of data each form that needed to be checked and verified, there was neither staff nor space to do the reconciliation in a timely manner.
ýOur pre-audit manual process was inadequate,ý Afford says. ýWe werenýt getting compliance for the program. We couldnýt process all the forms and do all the checks without technology.ý
Working with value added reseller Fax Masters of Santa Ana, CA, LADOT developed an automated imaging/forms processing solution. Teleform Elite from Cardiff Software (San Marcos, CA) handles document scanning and verification, while FileMagic Network Image Management from Westbrook Technologies (Branford, CT) takes care of storage and retrieval. The software is deployed on a Microsoft NT network running SQL Server, and hardware includes a Fujitsu (San Jose, CA) duplex scanner and a CD-ROM jukebox.
Automating required changing the cab companiesý contracts, redesigning forms and training the cab companies and drivers on the new system. Fax Masters redesigned the four critical forms--the invoice, company waybill (a summary document), the driverýs trip form, and the client scrip--for scanning.
One crucial element is the barcoding on the trip forms and scrip. Each trip form is barcoded with a cab companyýs identification number; this also serves as a batch ID during processing. Each index-card-size scrip page holds six peel-off labels barcoded with the clientýs identification number, the quarter of issue and an expiration date.
When a client pays for a cab ride with scrip, the driver fills in the front of a trip form and sticks the scrip on the back. When the taxi company submits its invoice, waybills and trip forms, these are scanned and checked for errors and omissions. The application reads the hand-printed driver ID, fare amount and number of scrip coupons from the front of each trip form and zone-scans the back to count the scrip coupons. It uses the barcodes to verify the client ID and date. Forms are kicked out if there is invalid data or if the scrip has been incorrectly attached to the trip form.
ýYou get a 100-percent check immediately as the forms are processed,ý Afford says. ýIf there are discrepancies, the fields are flagged and the clerks review those fields. At the settlement stage we know how much the invoice is, how much weýve rejected and how much still has to be settled. The rejected items are supported by images of the related documents.ý
The settlement form, with its accompanying document copies, also lets providers check their internal procedures for problems or cheating. In addition, the data is immediately available to auditors, who can analyze it for patterns of use (and abuse).
ýWe put the images on a CD-ROM using FileMagic and we file them in the jukebox so we have easy access and retrieval, which we didnýt have before,ý Afford explains.
LADOT is now sure that it is paying only what it should be, and theyýre paying it within the thirty-day timeframe required. They no longer need to outsource data-entry work they formerly needed for federal reports. The system has directly saved $200,000 a year in personnel costs (including overtime for manual auditing), but Afford estimates the savings from improved compliance and eliminated fraud and irregularities could approach $800,000 annually. U
(San Marcos, CA) handles document scanning and verification, while FileMagic Network Image Management from Westbrook Technologies (Branford, CT) takes care of storage and retrieval. The software is deployed on a Microsoft NT network running SQL Server, and hardware includes a Fujitsu (San Jose, CA) duplex scanner and a CD-ROM jukebox.
Automating required changing the cab companiesý contracts, redesigning forms and training the cab companies and drivers on the new system. Fax Masters redesigned the four critical forms--the invoice, company waybill (a summary document), the driverýs trip form, and the client scrip--for scanning.
One crucial element is the barcoding on the trip forms and scrip. Each trip form is barcoded with a cab companyýs identification number; this also serves as a batch ID during processing. Each index-card-size scrip page holds six peel-off labels barcoded with the clientýs identification number, the quarter of issue and an expiration date.
When a client pays for a cab ride with scrip, the driver fills in the front of a trip form and sticks the scrip on the back. When the taxi company submits its invoice, waybills and trip forms, these are scanned and checked for errors and omissions. The application reads the hand-printed driver ID, fare amount and number of scrip coupons from the front of each trip form and zone-scans the back to count the scrip coupons. It uses the barcodes to verify the client ID and date. Forms are kicked out if there is invalid data or if the scrip has been incorrectly attached to the trip form.
ýYou get a 100-percent check immediately as the forms are processed,ý Afford says. ýIf there are discrepancies, the fields are flagged and the clerks review those fields. At the settlement stage we know how much the invoice is, how much weýve rejected and how much still has to be settled. The rejected items are supported by images of the related documents.ý
The settlement form, with its accompanying document copies, also lets providers check their internal procedures for problems or cheating. In addition, the data is immediately available to auditors, who can analyze it for patterns of use (and abuse).
ýWe put the images on a CD-ROM using FileMagic and we file them in the jukebox so we have easy access and retrieval, which we didnýt have before,ý Afford explains.
LADOT is now sure that it is paying only what it should be, and theyýre paying it within the thirty-day timeframe required. They no longer need to outsource data-entry work they formerly needed for federal reports. The system has directly saved $200,000 a year in personnel costs (including overtime for manual auditing), but Afford estimates the savings from improved compliance and eliminated fraud and irregularities could approach $800,000 annually. U
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