Cities Readiness Initiative (CRI) is a federally-funded pilot program to aid U.S. cities in increasing their capacity to deliver medicines and medical supplies during a large-scale public health emergency. Such emergencies could include a bioterrorism attack, pan-flu epidemic or nuclear accident. The program is overseen by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
One of the cities participating in the pilot program is Chicago. Chicago-based integrator EKI-Consulting has designed a solution to help track emergency treatment for all Chicago residents, incorporating solutions from Datacap, Kodak, Bowe, Bell + Howell and IBM/FileNet. In a worst-case scenario, the Chicago Department of Public Health (CDPH) would have to dispense medications citywide to approximately three million people within 48 hours.
In order to track the identity of individual recipients and dispensed medications, CRI issued an Information Form that is filled out with each medical encounter. CDPH needed a reliable, automated solution for capturing, storing and retrieving these forms with a high throughput capacity. The solution required efficient and accurate analysis of medicine distribution and recipient coverage as well as a search capability for individuals to view an electronic copy of their CRI Information Form.
Once installed, the challenge for CDPH is to ensure that its staff is always prepared to use the system. “We hope to never have to use this solution for a large scale public emergency,” acknowledged Steve Mier, Director of Administration for CDPH. “However, we wanted our staff to be properly trained. Therefore, we needed a solution we could apply to existing programs to enable us to regularly utilize the technology and maintain high levels of proficiency.”
The two programs currently utilizing the application are the School-Based Oral Health Program, which provides free dental services to as many as 400,000 Chicago children in about 600 elementary schools, and the Immunization Program, which strives to increase resident immunizations and decrease the incidence of diseases that are preventable with vaccinations.
The School-Based Oral Health Program generates many different forms, in both English and Spanish. In order for CDPH to bill the State and Federal healthcare programs for the children they serve, the system must capture and deliver relevant information. Additionally, Chicago’s Immunization program involves distribution of immunizations and vaccinations to nearly 36,000 people per year and requires completion of multiple forms for each recipient, all of which must be registered and tracked.
With 120,000 immunization forms and 500,000 dental forms annually, the data entry workforce cannot support the volume of paperwork using manual methods. Additionally, with paper records, reporting on the program’s efficacy is untimely, and searching for historical records is labor-intensive.
Steve Shimkus is Solution Advisor/Project Manager at EKI, an electronic solutions provider, and recommended Datacap Taskmaster’s automated information capture technology. EKI develops software applications that help organizations streamline information capture and simplify business processes.
Thefull solution developed includes Datacap Taskmaster, Kodak and Bowe Bell & Howell scanners and an IBM/FileNet Enterprise Content Management system.
With the technology solution developed by EKI, Taskmaster drives the scanning of completed CRI information forms, extracts relevant information from each form with OCR/ICR, and routes that information to IBM/FileNet for efficient storage and retrieval. The data can then be used for reporting and searching as necessary.
Installed in 2007, Taskmaster automates input of both the School-Based Oral Health and Immunization Program forms, extracts the relevant information from each form and forwards data and images to IBM/FileNet. The system provides the appropriate reports to CDPH and the State of Illinois. More importantly, the ongoing use of Taskmaster for both programs ensures that CDPH staff is well-trained to support the CRI requirements when and if a disaster should occur.
“EKI and the City of Chicago have put together an application with important implications for disaster preparedness and recovery. We are proud that Taskmaster can play a role in the time-critical gathering of data in the event of an emergency,” said Scott Blau, CEO of Datacap.
Since 1988, Datacap Inc. has provided leading document capture and forms processing software solutions to organizations worldwide. Datacap Taskmaster software efficiently transforms paper into information, reducing data entry costs and improving information accuracy. A client/server, rules-based document capture workflow platform, Taskmaster provides highly flexible solutions for both image indexing and data entry automation. Taskmaster also enables scanning, indexing and administration from a browser and integrates with all leading document management solutions. http://www.datacap.com/
EKI specializes in applications development for companies requiring quality solutions that are delivered in a timely and cost effective manner. Projects range from the development of Internet portals to the administration of global email systems. We work across multiple platforms and support many technologies so that we can choose the best solutions that meet our clients’ needs. With experience in web portals, e-commerce, knowledge management, employee intranets, workgroup collaboration and process automation technologies, EKI can support the broadest range of project development initiatives. http://www.eki-consulting.com