Field Inspection Scanning & Management for County Health Departments

County Health Departments across Florida and the nation commonly struggle with paper, particularly when it comes to daily field inspection reports. Should they all be scanned? How can they be captured electronically in the first place? And how can the be instantly found later instead of hunting through filing cabinets?

This blog post presents a better way to manage field inspection reports and how to go paperless.

The Field Inspection Challenge

One county health department in Central Florida has 18 separate field inspection reports, all of which are captured on a different form and indexing fields. Every day, send out eight field inspectors to visit five or six sites. Each inspector returns to the office with all this paperwork for someone else to process and file. This is the definition of inefficiency.

Electronic Capture

Some counties scan their incoming field inspection reports, which is a step in the right direction. However, if they’re scanned to a network file, there is no quick or easy way to retrieve these documents.

In a perfect world, all inspection reports would be electronic. This is possible if each daily inspection report are captured on a tablet with an e-forms app. This eliminates all paper, filing and manual processing. Data entry errors are also reduced because it’s captured once, right at the source.

Instant Retrieval

To instantly find them later, document management software is the ideal way to manage electronic field inspection reports. Indexed fields make specific reports easy to find and document management software can be integrated with both e-forms software, so reports don’t need to be printed out after being capture, as well as with your back-end ERP system.

The best part: document management software has never been more cost-effective or easier to implement.

Legacy Field Inspection Reports

Even with all incoming field inspection reports electronically captured, what about all of the old field inspection reports? Scanning them is ideal but do they all need to be scanned? No. We recommend scanning the last two years and then scanning any legacy field inspection reports that need to be pulled instead of re-filing them.

Getting Started

Is your health department overwhelmed by daily field inspection reports? If so, contact us to learn more about the right mix of document scanning services, e-forms solutions and document management software for your county.

Contact us to learn more about document scanning, e-forms and document management