Youthdale Treatment Centres

Our Journey to Digitization“Paper Wars”

A little bit about Youthdale Treatment Centres

Youthdale is a mental health treatment centre for children, which has been in operation for more than 40 years in Ontario.

How Youthdale has grown, and why we need digitization

When Youthdale started 40 years ago, we had a small office and one Youth Residence. We now operate with 8 distinct services and departments, with over 300 employees.

“Paper Wars” – Project Timeline

Change the System, not the Process

Youthdale E-Forms

• We have over 600 different forms in use across the agency

• We constantly require signatures and initials

• We currently need to audit scanned documents before destruction (slow process)

• We want to gather data from forms and surveys for future use (data mining)

The Future of E-Forms at Youthdale

This is a video link where I go through a quick demo of using an E-Form, saving it as a PDF, but also tying it into an SQL table, and how that is useful. The video is not shared publicly, so please let me know if you need to view it. Thanks. (this txt will be removed from the presentation)

Youthdale Historical Document Digitization

• Youthdale has over 8 million historical documents in storage

• By law we must retain historical documents for approximately 20 years

• We often need to produce these documents for litigious purposes

The Journey and The Obstacles

Our First Obstacle – User Acceptance

Key Steps to raise user acceptance levels1. Solicit feedback. Send out surveys, or meet with key staff

members from different departments with different perspectives

2. Offer spaced out training sessions, and refresher courses

3. Empower your user community

Customizing NSI Autostore to work with a Barcode Solution we simplified the MFP Interface down to a 2

button system

Our Second Obstacle - The “How”

Client Barcode Category Barcode

The “How” continued…

Youthdale Client File Tree Structure• Separated tree branches for

different departments, and different security access levels

• Each client file (defined at the root of the tree) requires a duplicate structure with the same security settings

The “How” continued…

Final Obstacle – The Transition

•We will need to audit client files before destruction

• An audit committee will be setup to perform ongoing audits and approve individual files for destruction

• Eventually we will destroy all paper files and work only in Docushare

In Summary• Youthdale has taken a 3 Phase approach

(important to plan a realistic timeline)

• We have succeeded in implementing barcode based scanning

(keep in mind how to increase user acceptance)

• We will use E-Forms to eliminate paper for our client file, and provide a wealth of data to be mined in SQL format

(the power of E-Forms lies in it’s multiple uses, and it’s ability to provide real longevity to your data)

• We will eventually have over 8 million documents in Docushare, spanning the 40+ years our agency has been in service

(plan effectively, and you can build a lot on that foundation)

• Questions? Comments?