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If you are thinking of whether to go for ecm or not, here are five benefits that will help you in making the right decision.

Business Assessment:

Enterprise Content Management or ECM should be implemented to help businesses achieve overall targets. Every organization wishes to operate under minimal costs and maximum profit range. There are four key drivers that form as the decision ground for a company in ECM adoption: improvised customer service, reduced cost, ensuring continuity in business and regulatory compliance. For a business, thorough assessment on all these fronts is necessary before deciding on ECM. Success in every vertical can be identified by measuring business benefits.

Assessing the Technological Front:

Businesses should initiate a thorough technology assessment to list out what they have currently and what more is required to meet business goals. The target is to find the existing gap between current practices and future trends and then working towards mending that gap.

Expert Assistance:

Not all the system integrators can give you desired results. It is therefore necessary to look out for the experts in the field. The technical professional that you have selected must exhibit correct knowledge from all the decisions he or she undertakes. Commitment to work as the partner to the lifecycle of the enterprise content management system is necessary.

Choose your vendors carefully

Since vendors work in conjunction with your company’s overall objectives, their selection must be done with great care. A wrong selection can lead company’s ECM ambitions to a dead end. Consider financial liability, usability, cost-benefit analysis and scalability of the situation before hiring the vendor.

Demand Proof of Handling

Before finalising on the system integrator, let the person demonstrate his skills on the recommended software and hardware. Their ease of usability will give you an idea of their knowledge in the subject. Generally, the vendors offer clients a time period to try out their program which will enable you to try the product’s functionality before making the purchase decision.

As a company, everyone requires to manage some sort of data for timely usage. There are various options through which this data can be stored and compiled into the machines. One way is to take a backup at the end of day and store the information at a secured location. This can become quite tedious and risky if the data is huge and the location of the server is far away. The other more professional and secure way is ECM or enterprise content management. ECM enables organizations to handle any sort of information with ease and speed. It delivers great promise to the companies whose offices are located in different cities and in different continents.

ECM or enterprise content management uses a wide array of technologies and components in order to deliver expert solutions to any organizations’ problems. These components can be stand-alone systems that do the work instead of an enterprise-based system. ECM helps in managing, controlling, utilizing, and sharing of crucial data and hence streamlines the whole business process of an organization. It works like a dedicated network in the background that collects whole lot of information and delivers the same information whenever asked for by the end user.

ECM thus integrates organizations applications in a very professional manner and increases the longevity of the content that gets delivered to the users. Furthermore, it reduces the risks of proliferation and checks duplicity at each step that itself is a high risk area. While you look out to purchase good enterprise content management software for your company, it is always essential to keep a few things in mind such as:

1. Select the ECM according to your organizations budget and design.
2. Enterprise content management requires constant updates, therefore it is essential to spend in parts over a period of time instead at one go.
3. Do not go for the cheaper options, purchase a tried and tested model suited best for your organization.

Molina Healthcare decreases turnaround time for credentialing by 44% while doubling number of applications processed per month

Much has been made lately of the benefits that can accrue to healthcare providers through the use of electronic medical records. In fact, one of the major long-term goals of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (ARRA) is to “initiate a process to computerize health records. In fact, one of the major long-term goals of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (ARRA) is to “initiate a process to computerize health records to reduce medical errors and save on health care costs.”

But medical records are only one area in which providers can reap the benefits of working with secure, digital files. For organizations such as Molina Healthcare, a managed care organization (MCO) serving low-income individuals who frequently depend on government assistance, implementing a Laserfiche enterprise content management (ECM) system to digitize and streamline the healthcare provider credentialing process has proven to be extremely valuable.

The Importance of Credentialing

Credentialing is integral to the success of any healthcare organization, but it is a particularly important process for an MCO like Molina Healthcare. Effective credentialing helps MCOs manage liability risk, attract customers and obtain accreditation from organizations such as The Joint Commission and NCQA. It is also a procedural requirement by federal agencies such as CMS and various state agencies.

Molina Healthcare, a Fortune 1000 company that operates in nine states—California, Florida, Ohio, Michigan, Missouri, New Mexico, Texas, Utah and Washington—handles more than fifteen thousand provider applications a year. Legally, a healthcare practitioner cannot participate in Molina’s network until the credentialing process is completed and a determination has been made to approve that provider for participation.

“Every day a provider remains in the credentialing process,” says Ryan Boe, corporate credentialing manager at Molina Healthcare, “is another day that he or she can’t provide care for our members.”

According to Boe, applications frequently consist of 30-100 pages of material, including a physician’s state license, board certification, criminal history report, stated work history, educational background, malpractice history and more. “Dealing with paper,” he says, “is much slower than working with electronic records.”

Paper Process

In the past, Molina’s credentialing department produced a single paper copy of each application and routed it to different people during the credentialing process. According to Michael Eisenman, healthcare analyst for the credentialing department, coordinating the logistics and timing for moving applications through various steps of the process was difficult.

“When you’re reviewing hundreds of applications a month, it’s not practical to physically transfer them one-by-one,” he says. “But transporting hardcopy files in batches leads to processing bottlenecks, which slows everything down.”

From a cost standpoint, printing paper applications consumed reams and reams of paper, and the special couriers who shipped credentialing files between offices were an additional expense. Additionally, the physical space needed to store and retain the documentation (including a great number of wall racks) led to extra cost.

Working with paper also brings up liability issues for MCOs like Molina: “HIPAA mandates that we keep medical information secure, but it’s hard to do that with paper files,” Eisenman explains. “Paper isn’t password-protected, and it doesn’t produce an audit trail.”

Implementing Enterprise Content Management

Tasked with finding the best way to digitize credentialing applications and automate key pieces of the credentialing process, an IT committee chose a Laserfiche Rio ECM system due to its rich scanning, workflow, security and auditing features.

Despite a few initial difficulties around business process engineering, solution design, training and adoption, the department soon ironed out the kinks, staggering the implementation state-by-state over a period of six months.

According to Sampath Nalam, technical lead in Molina’s IT department, the system’s ease of use accelerated its adoption. Initial product training and consistent technical support from the Laserfiche technical team also helped Molina to understand the Laserfiche product architecture, resolve implementation issues and accelerate the project deliveries.

The IT department trained the credentialing managers, who then trained their staff. “Most users picked it up pretty easily within a couple of days,” says Nalam. “It’s not too complex for users to understand and navigate through the Laserfiche application.”

Eisenman echoes this sentiment: “Laserfiche is very intuitive for users. It’s pretty close to point and click.”

ECM in Action

In order to put Laserfiche into action, one of the first steps for Molina was to restructure its credentialing process to take advantage of the system’s capabilities. “Today,” says Eisenman, “all roads for credentialing lead to Laserfiche.”

When a practitioner is being credentialed with Molina for the first time, departments outside of Credentialing obtain the application data—either from a physical application or from CAQH, one of the largest credentialing data sources in the country. The application data soon ends up in the credentialing department, which is where 85% of the work associated with the credentialing process takes place.

“We get a hodgepodge of data sets,” explains Eisenman. “XML data, text files, PDFs, spreadsheets, paper… the list goes on and on. We pre-process the data to make sure it meets our standards and organize it into an intelligent list, at which point it all goes into Laserfiche.”

In Laserfiche, the data is automatically filed—usually in large batches—in the Laserfiche folder structure. Once the information is in the system, the ‘Laserfiche workflow’ kicks in, alerting people to the various tasks they must perform on each application. For example, credentialing specialists populate template fields with metadata to indicate file completion or file discontinuance, which moves the file forward to a credentialing lead, who quality checks each file.

“We now have about 100 people using enterprise content management to some degree, and about 50 of those people use Laserfiche on a continuous and daily basis,” says Boe. “After a bit of trial and error, we’ve figure out our ideal process for implementing a centralized and paperless credentialing system.”

Measurable Results

Molina’s corporate credentialing department has realized a number of benefits resulting from its Laserfiche implementation, including:

• Decreased turnaround time (TAT) for processing applications by 44%.
• Twice as many applications processed per month.
• Greater visibility of information enterprise-wide.
• Faster provider network development.
• Decreased credentialing costs.
• Standardization of procedures and workflows.
• Improved security of protected information.

“The Laserfiche SDK has enabled us to automate an incredible amount of our data processing,” Eisenman says. “It has made the credentialing process much faster and much more consistent.”

“When we first started working with Laserfiche, there was a brief period when the TAT went up and our volume went down as we adjusted to the new process and the new technology,” Boe explains. “Once we’d conquered that initial learning curve and overcome the initial technical hurdles, however, the speed at which we can process applications skyrocketed. We’re currently completing approximately 1,500 applications a month, which is up from just under 800 a month a year back.”

“We’re very happy with ECM,” Boe concludes. “It has accelerated the credentialing process and added a lot of value to our organization.”

When the County of Hawaii first purchased Laserfiche as its enterprise content management platform in 2007, it had some idea of the kind of improvements to business operations that could come from content management. Various departments had been using their own ECM systems since the late 1990s and the County of Hawaii’s Office of the Corporation Counsel had deployed its own Laserfiche system in 2005, with great success.

“Starting small with the Corporation Counsel Office showed us the software could do more than just scanning,” says former Systems Analyst Fatima Hicks. “It gave us an initial success that other departments could look to and start asking how they could use it.”

In 2007, Hicks’ team had initially focused on expanding Laserfiche to seven County departments: Public Works, Planning, Real Property Tax, County Clerk’s, Motor Vehicle Registration & Licensing, Corporation Counsel and Elections. Treasury was added in 2008 as a part of the Motor Vehicle repository.

When Systems Analyst Sheila Cadaoas became Laserfiche Project Manager in April 2009, she saw the potential – and value – of converting to enterprise content management named-user licensing as well as upgrading to version 8. “I felt strongly that we needed to make every feature of every ECM module equally available to every user,” Cadaoas says, noting that Rio licensing includes not just Snapshot and the E-mail Plug-In, but also Web Access, Workflow and Advanced Audit Trail. Because each Rio named user license is assigned to an individual staff member, they are always able to access their information, and when new users are added to the system, all components – including Workflow – are immediately available for their use.

A windsurfer off the coast of Hawaii.

“We also wanted to expand usage to wring every drop of productivity possible out of Laserfiche. Our mindset is still very focused on the departments and their respective business processes; Rio’s unlimited servers and repositories just make it even more adaptable to the needs of the business units,” she adds.

From an IT perspective, Cadaoas says, Rio made even more sense. “The Rio licensing has lower annual maintenance fees per user, plus it allows unlimited growth in the number of servers and number of repositories,” Cadaoas says. “With our old system, we were running up against issues of size and the speed of search responses. Having unlimited servers allows us to break our repositories up into smaller chunks.” For instance, she says, though the Treasury Division currently uses the Motor Vehicle repository, with added security to separate users, it will have its own repository by summer.

The Rio system has only been live since the end of January, but already the County has created three new repositories: one each for the Office of the Legislative Auditor, the Department of Liquor Control, and one for Data Systems called “Area 51.” Liquor Control has a room full of Licensed Liquor Establishment documents to manage, while the Legislative Auditor will use Laserfiche to organize the research and documentation produced with each audit. “Legislative Auditor and Liquor Control were both created and initial training given to end users in about two hours each,” she says. “These are the users that are going for it. We gave them Laserfiche and said, ‘You don’t have to wait for Data Systems. You can set up your folders, your own security and run with it.’”

County of Hawaii Systems Analyst Sheila Cadaoas

Cadaoas notes that the user-friendliness of Laserfiche is also IT-friendly: “When we can get people set up and using the system this fast, it leverages my time as well.”

The third repository – “Area51″ – is a proving ground for the Data Systems analysts. “We test workflows, Quick Fields sessions, and new ideas in general without having to interfere with our live repositories,” explains Cadaoas.

By the end of June, the county will add the Mayor’s Office, Research & Development and Human Resources to their Laserfiche system. As important as it is to expand Laserfiche to new departments, Cadaoas says, it’s equally important to manage the human side of change. “We’re setting up monthly ‘super user’ group meetings to share ideas and extend training,” she says. “Our first session will be at the end of March and our training topics are folder setup with security and template/metadata creation.”

Finally, Cadaoas says Rio’s multiple repositories will play a big role in simplifying and improving how content is published and accessed on the county’s Website through the expanded WebLink public portal the County purchased with its upgrade. “Currently we only have the County Clerk Legislative documents available via WebLink. With Rio we have the capability to create a WebLink public folder structure in each repository,” she says.

“Our current County Website is very labor intensive for both Data Systems and the other departments. With Rio, documents will now only exist once instead of twice because they’re being accessed right from the repository, and they’ll be public within seconds of the user moving them into the proper folder – we won’t have to convert it to publish it,” Cadaoas explains. “Plus, the public will be able to use the Laserfiche search capabilities. We’re looking forward to Laserfiche adding a ‘federated search’ capability that would allow the public to search multiple repositories – then our WebLink Public Portal will truly be a sight to behold!”

Used by companies to capture, manage, store, and deliver important documentation, enterprise content management is a tool for organizing pertinent information. With problems in the past concerning management of records and other documentation including losing records, human error, and many more, this management system was designed to address problems and serve as a way to manage information but also to convert it to and from digital materials. Through this auditing, sharing of knowledge, and standardizing of content can be accomplished.

Starting out as simply content management, enterprise content management encompasses everything in a business, not just the things that are shown to people on the outside but things like an intranet make it possible to swap information within a business or company. Therefore this solution for content management is focused on a business to employee model. These solutions provide in-house information that is usually based on internet technologies. Other services included are business to business and business to government. Another form of content management is called digital asset management; this also concentrates on using digital electronic technology to store information.

Paper based businesses were overwhelming. With so many documents and paperwork it seemed impossible to get everything done that needed to be. There was a lot of value in the offer of a program that would store necessary documents and information and would do it without the clutter. People in these companies wanted an office that was clear from the clutter of paper. ECM was of high value for these organizations and offered to save them time, among other benefits. Some other top resulting benefits include the following: less lost documents, less error, less storage needs, better control and accuracy, improved security and better tracking of information.

More companies became users of ECM products and it was extremely useful for them all. Customer service departments found it extremely useful in that they were able to merge everything together and only have to go to that one place to pull up any information a customer might seek. And once internet use exploded and businesses were popping up all over cyberspace, they had the capabilities through these programs to share their information with others. Today, these management systems are all over and they have branched out to include a whole array of systems. Content management has become a booming industry and has expanded capabilities and the ability to function for businesses worldwide.

Laserfiche-Rio is Enterprise Content Management Software (ECM) for Document Management, Collaboration, Knowledge Management and Business Process Management - enterprise class business management software.for more details visit our site: http://www.laserfiche.com/rio

Document management is arguably one of the most important aspects of an enterprise content management system. The earliest document management systems were developed to manage proprietary file types or a limited number of file formats. Today, document management systems have grown to encompass electronic documents, collaboration tools, security, and auditing capabilities. ECM has been defined as the strategies, methods and tools used to manage, store, preserve and deliver content and documents related to organizational processes. ECM tools and strategies allow the management of an organization’s unstructured information, wherever that information exists. There are several benefits to having a quality document management system as part of a powerful enterprise content management system.

• The digital centralized location of the files enables people to obtain files and information without entering a file room or shuffling through a messy filing cabinet.
• ECM systems typically use a database to store metadata and administrators can authorize access to authorized personnel.
• Document management platforms have different ways of creating documents as well as a simple yet inclusive workflow design. Documents can easily be passed from one person to another. This is very useful when multiple people need to collaborate on a project.

Not only can enterprise content management systems simplify projects and make communication between people much easier, they also reduce paperwork. With the development of these platforms, companies are approaching a paperless office. Proponents of enterprise content management have argued that paperless services are faster, cheaper, more efficient, and more environment-friendly. Society has almost reached the point where computer files are out of date. Endless folders on one’s desktop contain thousands of files which one has to sort through to find needed information. Sharing files on a web workspace will eventually replace storing them on the computer’s hard drive. In addition, a large, powerful database in another location stores files for a company for any authorized user to access without having to hunt down the actual file and the computer which contains the file. The future is unfolding before our eyes. More and more companies are adapting ECM as a way to connect and network among their employees.