Sta-Home Health & Hospice

Challenge

With so many remote employees, managing massive amounts of paperwork in HR and Payroll was overwhelming in a highly regulated industry. Sta-Home used a centralized paper filing system for years. Each branch office would ship all paperwork to the corporate office to be filed weekly. As the company continued to grow, it became clear that this paper process couldn’t go on forever. Besides AP, each month, over 15,000 HR documents were being manually filed.” Nancy Dunn, HR Information Systems Administrator stated, “We had grown too large to continue storing paper for all of our current and past employees. The situation was getting worse and every month we were spending valuable time and money on feeding an inefficient process of paper movement and filing.” When the filing cabinet became full, Sta-Home moved documents offsite using expensive paper storage services costing more than $50,000 annually.

Solution

Dunn’s first HR project was to capture documents linked to their Learning Management System (LMS) which tracked employee training, education, skills assessments, and scores. Dunn imported and linked them via employee ID. “Having these assessments available at a moment’s notice has saved us a tremendous amount of time. Now, when we are surveyed by the Mississippi Department of Health, notice of our nurses’ skill assessment documents is required and critical to our ability to comply and pass an audit,” she stated.

DocLink also captures all new hire documentation from the 39 remote locations. Staff scans up to 100 different document types, each with multiple pages per employee and transfers these image files to the corporate office to be archived. “We capture identification documents (i9, driver’s license, social security card), background documents (drug test, waivers, emergency contracts), banking and financial documents (direct deposit, tax forms, 401K), employment requirement documents (NDA, non-compete), and health documents (physical results, skills checklist, leave of absence),” said Dunn.

Benefits

“The Health Department consistently performs unannounced ‘surveys’ to show we are in compliance with appraisals, skills, current licenses, and credentials as well as patient care. Businesses like ours wouldn’t exist without government-funded programs so we know the importance of keeping great records. With a paper filing system, it would literally take all day to pull information to satisfy survey requirements. Now that we use DocLink, survey time has been reduced to hours in most cases,” said Dunn.

HR utilizes Workflow to route Employee Status Forms through approval and also intend to track hardware by archiving by product and serial numbers to employee IDs. This is especially important for HIPAA compliance. “If a device is ever lost and contains patient information, we could act quickly before patient data is compromised. We can also create alerts when devices need to be serviced or replaced,” explained Dunn. Sta-Home plans to roll out DocLink next in Business and Administrative. “We have lots of company-held teaching credentials, certifications, and licenses. The applications with DocLink are endless,” commented Dunn.