As businesses are reopening and establishing new safety processes, we are seeing an uptick in COVID-19 health screenings and wellness check forms for in-facility employees. While this is a great business process to potentially mitigate the risk of the spreading the virus, it imports a potential HIPAA compliance issue. The collection of this information, who has access to it, and how its being stored - requires stringent processes as it is considered 'medical' information.

If you are concerned about your current business processes regarding the collection of HIPAA related content, we can help.  We can implement a digital content management solution which provides digital forms supported by strengthened electronic file repository to support HIPAA recommendations for employee medical information. The collection of information is unique per submitter, the access to information is fully secured, and the storage of information can be per submitter, per day, in an individual employee medical file.

As a business consultant specializing in digital office efficiency, we provide solutions to help organizations support compliance requirements. 

Lots of great scanners on the market right now. Our recommendation is always which scanner is the best for you, because your job requirements and scanning requirements are relative to you. Two important metrics to know when identifying the best scanner for you.

1. Pages per minute. A scanners speed is determined by PPM or pages per minute, which  is the amount of pages that can pass through the scanner in one minute. If you have a lot of scanning to do, waiting on a slow scanner can create frustration.

2. Suggested Daily Volume. A scanners volume is determined by the Suggested Daily volume. If you are scanning a large volume of paper per day, you will want to pick a scanner with a larger suggested daily volume than your expected scanning volume. If you over work your scanner, you will experience double feeds, errors, jams, etc, things that will cause frustration.

We are happy to help you identify which scanner is the best... for you, to help complete your daily scanning requirements in an acceptable time frame.

A California County Air Resource District has deployed Laserfiche Forms to help constituents apply for the County Electric Vehicle Incentive program. This program allows County Citizens that have purchased or own an electric vehicle - apply for cash or tax-break incentives.
 
Traditionally, this process was completed via email or in person with paper forms, requiring the applicant to bring copies of their registration and vehicle purchase agreement to the Air Resource District office. After District review, back and forth with the applicant, internal reviews, lots of paper moving, the application moves to payment and the applicant receives a check in the mail. This process was marked with time consuming inefficiencies.
 
The Air District now provides a public facing digital form to qualify, process, approve, and pay applicants. This process allows the applicant to self-identify if they qualify for the program, submit digital copies of all required information, deliver organized information for admins to process, and finally, send checks to the applicants.
 
Staff time on the program was reduced considerably as there have been fewer phone calls (due to the auto email response), less printing, compiling, and filing of paperwork.  Also, the District used one less staff person for these activities.  The approval workflow smoothed out the process between departments, allowing for quick management review and seamless transition to administration for processing and sending checks to the applicants.

If you are an essential worker and having employees return to work or have an essential staff you manage; it could make sense to provide a digital Health Screening Questionnaire. This form can easily be built in your forms portal and published to the internet to be completed on a tablet or phone prior employees entering your facility.

If this is something you are interested in, it will only require a few Appleby Imaging service hours and could be available in just a couple days. Let me know how we can help you support your current or returning staff. Stay safe!

When adopting a document management system, a key decision at the beginning of discovery will always be metadata. Metadata defines how a document is stored, how it is searched, and most importantly for an end user, how much labor is involved when inputting data. If this index data exists in another system, we will always pursue options of how to get it from the current system into Laserfiche with minimal data entry. Sometimes, we are able to utilize advanced capture methods such as Quickfields or Ancora, but it is often best to index straight from the source via a unique identifier.

An example of this would be using a Student Information System such as Aeries or PowerSchool to find student information based on a unique identifier like a Student ID and populating other items such as first name, last name, date of birth and state ID.

Laserfiche and Docuware both offer many ways of doing this including Workflow and Connectors that do this quickly via screen scrape, SQL/ODBC or other Web APIs efficiently in the background with minimal wait time and and employee overhead.

Appleby Imaging Inc. has completed software database look-ups with the below applications, but not limited to:

• Quickbooks (on premise and online)
• Xero
• Aeries
• Power School
• Analytic
• Famous
• Springbrook
• Edjoin
• SASE
• Any other SQL database or API!