Drafting Accurate Documents Efficiently in a Standardized Way
Carrying out the licensing and regulatory responsibilities as an EMS agency requires accuracy and efficiency in drafting documents. Ben Keizer from the Contra Costa County EMS Agency offers insights into the challenges encountered prior to implementing SmartDocuments as the agency’s new document creation solution and discusses the results of working with SmartDocuments.
Ben Keizer is the Prehospital Care Coordinator at the Contra Costa County EMS Agency. “As a program manager, I manage license interactions, certification and accreditation, investigations into misconduct, and the public safety first aid oversight program for the county. I am also the administrator for the Agency’s licensing software,” Ben introduces himself. “We send out a good amount of notices daily in the agency, for example, in investigations, and to renew, cancel or revoke licenses. We also create complex legal documents for accusations and pleading documents. Aside from the documents we send out to the people we license and regulate, we also put out memos and bulletins to the public.”
Ben Keizer, Prehospital Care Coordinator at the Contra Costa County EMS Agency
The Challenges of Manually Adjusting Documents
“Previously we had a library of Microsoft Word documents as templates, separated into different categories,” Ben continues. “When needing to send out a notice or document, I would take a template, save as, and modify. In time, I would highlight the places where I needed to go in, so that when I would open a template, I knew what I needed to change. However, we’d find that our accuracy was lowered, because we would manually adjust each piece of a document and mistakes slip in easily. We would spend a lot of time to get a template out, and we’d end up with little variations between templates and forget which one was the correct one. So not only did it take a long time, we were not as accurate as we wanted to be.”
“SmartDocuments automatically populates different
data points in various documents.”
Standardized Documents
“This prompted us to look for a solution to reduce our template count, to increase our efficiency and accuracy, and to standardize our way of working,” Ben explains. “With SmartDocuments, we have a library of standardized document templates.”
Boosting Accuracy and Efficiency
“SmartDocuments gives us the ability to connect data to our output and this output to our Document Management System (DMS),” Ben continues. “We combined this with SmartDocuments’ module for Multi-Document Output. This for example allows us to batch our EMT license notices, where before we had to segment based on different license statuses. Now, we push a report on the licensing in XML from our system, SmartDocuments reads the XML, recognizes the license status and automatically populates different data points in various documents. From here we output it and it goes to our DMS, or other repository to get processed.”
“The output is complete and looks the same every time.”
The Template is Always Leading
Ben: “As a government agency, we do a fair amount of public comment. This process is standardized in SmartDocuments. The output is complete and looks the same every time. The same goes for working with people outside our division on our more complicated legal documents. We are also able to separate the document templates and users into groups. This prevents individuals from seeing content that is irrelevant to their needs or duties.”
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