Distributed Capture System Helps California Department Of Mental Health

The California Department of Mental Health (DMH) is entrusted with leadership of the California mental health system and ensures the availability of effective, efficient, culturally competent services. It oversees a public mental health budget of nearly $2.2 billion dollars in the following areas: leadership for state and local county mental health departments; evaluation and monitoring; administration of federal funds; and the direct operation of the Atascadero, Metropolitan (located in Norwalk), Napa and Patton State Hospitals as well as, an Acute Psychiatric Program at the California Medical Facility near Vacaville.

Two years ago, the department recognized that it had several content management inefficiencies and that it needed to drastically update its legacy data capture, sharing and retrieval systems. The most pressing problems were redundant data entry tasks. A combination of non integrated systems, an inability to scale due to excessive labor dependencies, and excessive cycle times contributed wasted time and resources, errors due to manual filing and data entry and low internal and external customer service ratings.