CASE STUDY: OKLAHOMA DEPARTMENT OF HUMAN SERVICES
OVERVIEW
The Oklahoma Department of Human Services Office of Administrative Hearings (DHS/OAH) is recognized as the official administrative court system for the Child Support Division in Oklahoma. Located in Oklahoma City, the DHS/OAH central operations office provides administrative support to 30 regional court centers. These regional groups work closely with the central DHS/OAH office to provide accurate and efficient service to Oklahoma parents during the resolution of child support court hearings. The administrative staff at DHS/OAH strictly monitors statistics for all cases.
CHALLENGE
As DHS/OAH is the administrative court that handles child support cases for the entire state, they prepare approximately 3,000 cases per month for dockets. Using the old system, these files were pulled and mailed to 30 child support offices across the state, because the judges go to the child support offices to conduct hearings.
They previously mailed the files to the judges for the hearings and, once the hearings were completed and all the paperwork was in the court files, the judges mailed those files back to DHS/OAH. This was a time-consuming, inefficient - and very costly - way of handling court files. DHS/OAH also ran a high risk of having court files lost in the mail.
Furthermore, while the files were in transit, if the staff at DHS/OAH needed information from a file to address correspondence or respond to a phone inquiry involving a missing file, the staff could not retrieve that information immediately. They would have to wait for two weeks or more, until the file was returned from the field.
SOLUTION
Business Imaging Systems, Inc. (BIS) provided an end-to-end document imaging, storage, retrieval and management solution. The solution makes imaged case files available online for child support office staff, DHS/OAH staff and the judges.
The imaging system now in use by DHS/OAH is so much more than just a means of looking at files online. The imaging system and all of its features track every function the court clerk's office performs. They can search their database for an individual by a non-custodial person's name or social security number, a custodial person's name or social security number, family group number, or their internal case number. BIS also provided a feature that allows DHS/OAH to search for an individual utilizing just a few characters of a person's name or a portion of the family group number.
They also assign case numbers through this solution. All of the child support offices that utilize the administrative process now request their administrative court case numbers online. Docketing of cases is another feature of this system. Together, BIS and DHS/OAH have rolled out this feature to all 30 offices and have completed individual training at these offices. Each office is now docketing their cases online.
Other functions include: annual calendar for the judges and their hearings; monthly reports that track each office, each type of case, number of cases set per office, etc.; and compiling of monthly statistical reports (comparing office to office by week, month, cause of action or outcome of cases).
As part of this project, BIS did and continues to do the following:
- BIS worked within the restrictive network environment of a state agency to meet their specific needs.
- BIS supplied one Canon DR-5080C scanner and one Canon DR-3080C scanner.
- BIS supplies equipment and same-day maintenance service.
- BIS customized their MasterScan software for use in the DHS/OAH office.
- BIS customized the EMC Documentum ApplicationXtender software to allow DHS/OAH to double-check the scanning of documents into the appropriate case files.
- BIS customized a web application that is used in the field by workers and judges.
- BIS scanned over one million pages of "old" files at significant savings to the state.
- BIS provides storage for a cheaper fee than DHS/OAH's state archival system.
- BIS provided, and continues to provide, training, project management and other professional services.
RESULTS
An imaged file can be retrieved in real time, and any of the documents in that file can be viewed or printed at any location, such as a local child support office. Staff in the field can also retrieve docket information on individual cases and ascertain when and how often a case has been on the docket. They can also view their upcoming dockets and see exactly which cases have been docketed. Employees at DHS/OAH no longer need to run up and down the stairs retrieving files from the basement file room, or await files to return from the field via mail.
All procedural and system inefficiencies have been reduced or eliminated. Through imaging, automation and real-time data retrieval, DHS/OAH has increased productivity at the central operations office and in the field. They have eliminated significant postage costs, as 3,000 files are no longer sent (to and from the central operations office) through the mail per month. Customer service has improved considerably because staff can retrieve case information in real time, where in the past, it may have taken up to two weeks or more to retrieve information.
According to Virginia Smith and Chief Judge Carol Koger at DHS/OAH: "Our new case management system, implemented by BIS, has improved our efficiency many times over, saving us both time and money. It has so many invaluable, user-friendly functions that we virtually run our court on it."
