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Public Consulting Group uses One Touch Bar Code technology to automate Individualized Education Plan (IEP) authorizations

Public Consulting Group (PCG) is a large public sector consulting and technology firm with 1,100 professionals in 44 offices across the U.S., Canada, and Europe. PCG has been dedicated to helping clients improve their levels of service for over 25 years and one of the major areas of focus and expertise for PCG is public sector education.

CHALLENGE: FIND AN EFFICIENT AND SECURE WAY TO HANDLE IEP AUTHORIZATION

Students with special needs are legally required to have personalized education plans. PCG Education helps parents and educators design the Individualized Education Plans (IEPs) for these students.

In order to plan for the following school year or semester, parents and physicians have to provide consent, and authorize testing so that a proper IEP can be created. The appropriate forms and documents WWW.OTGT.COM are sent to them for approval signatures which are typically faxed back. In the past there were problems with the documentation procedures:

  • They receive up to 5,000 individual faxes per day, with some containing multiple barcodes. Processing these documents often required over a week for review and approval.
  • Paper documents and faxes required careful review to ensure that signed authorization forms were properly matched with the correct student information.
  • Process was quite burdensome when students transferred to new schools or districts. Historical information and signed documents had to move with them.
  • Hard-to-find documentation for audits.
  • Security issues due to the improper storage of documents.

More school districts have been signing on to PCG’s program and the volume of documentation for IEPs is increasing. They wanted to expedite authorization and provide a more secure way to process IEPs.

SOLUTION: IMPLEMENT FAXHQ (EASYFAX) TO HELP AUTOMATE ORDER PROCESSING

PCG Education wanted to make things as paperless as possible. They created a web solution called “EasyIEP” to create and manage Individualized Education Plans (IEPs); this is integrated with their “EasyFax” system that provides a secure and organized paperless environment for students’ IEPs. EasyFax actually consists of the One Touch FaxHQ with barcode recognition teamed with their HP Autonomy Teleform forms processing application.

FaxHQ enables efficient routing:

  • Parents and physicians can use the “EasyIEP” website to print out forms with barcodes. After these are completed they are signed and faxed back to PCG Education.
  • FaxHQ receives the signed inbound barcoded faxes and electronic documents, reads the barcodes, and matches the signed document with the original.
  • OTIS then routes the documents to HP Teleform where additional information is extracted from the documents. HP Teleform is used to create “bubble sheets” – forms where a person must fill in the bubbles – which are completed and returned for decoding.

“We needed a way to improve the process of authorizing IEPs; by implementing EasyFax with One Touch FaxHQ and Teleform, we are now able to provide much better service while managing a growing business.”

RESULTS & BENEFITS: BETTER EFFICIENCY LEADS TO SATISFIED CUSTOMERS

Now, parents, physicians and administrators can simply fax the signed documents and forms back to PCG Education.

FaxHQ closes the loop and provides a variety of benefits:

  • Reduced manual processing: FaxHQ provides an on-ramp to automate and streamline incoming document routing and the processing of signature pages, external IEPs, evaluation reports, and doctors’ orders.
  • Increased Speed: FaxHQ decodes and processes barcodes quickly and enables PCG Education to meet SLA requirements that data be in the system within 15 minutes after receipt.
  • Improved flexibility: Now it is much easier to transfer signed documents and historical information when students transfer to new schools or districts.
  • Improved accountability and compliance: Now that all information and documents are stored electronically, the retrieval of documents for auditing is faster, easier and more accurate. PCG Education can better serve school districts and help them achieve and maintain federal and state compliance.