Imaging VAR Finds Success In Education Vertical
This VAR used its document imaging expertise to help a college comply
with the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA).
Have you heard of FERPA? PMI Imaging Systems of Florida (PMI) has — and it’s continuing to grow at a rate of 50% this year due in part to this law. A branch of MTS Solutions, PMI and sister company AMI both specialize in document management products and services. FERPA is a federal law that protects the privacy of student education records. The law applies to all schools that receive funds under an applicable program of the U.S. Department of Education. Since this law is designed to protect the privacy of students, you might be thinking this is a story about security. That is not the case.
If you drill down, FERPA is really about document management. FERPA gives parents or eligible students the right to inspect, review, and make corrections to the student’s education records maintained by the school. In the case of Indian River Community College (IRCC) in Fort Pierce, FL, it means managing records for approximately 12,000 students per year. In this environment, IRCC needed a solution that would allow the school to retain, manage, and archive all student records — including all correspondence and files — indefinitely. IRCC also needed the ability to quickly find a student’s old records, respond to the student’s request for information, and offer the ability to retrieve and reactivate a record when a student enrolls or reenrolls at the institution. As a distributed campus, IRCC also wanted to more effectively manage the accounts payable process. The accounting staff was charged with responding to an increasing volume of information requests from managers at off-site campus locations.
Position Document Management To Help Meet FERPA Requirements
IRCC was already a customer of PMI’s when the VAR recommended Fortis from Westbrook Technologies as a replacement for IRCC’s prior-generation imaging system. IRCC has applied the Fortis document management system to several departments, including applications for student records, accounts payable, the office of the president, and the financial aid department.
The Fortis application is used at IRCC for all phases of document handling: capture, retention, and archiving. The initial application of Fortis is in the student records area. All new records are now converted to electronic format, including transcripts, correspondence, and other student reports. The record repositories enforce a security regimen consistent with FERPA. With regard to the backlog of old paper records, IRCC policy is to add old records into the electronic system when a student reenrolls at IRCC.
The staff now uses Fortis indexing and full text retrieval tools to access records when fielding requests for student records. The information can then be communicated directly over the phone, by e-mail, or through hard copy output.
A second application of Fortis is in the accounts payable department. Invoices are stored in Fortis so that account and payment inquiries can be handled quickly over the phone or by e-mail transmittal of documentation.
The final application of Fortis provides compliance with the State of Florida’s FPRA (Florida Public Records Act), by capturing and managing all board minutes and related official documents for the office of the president. The board minutes packages are typically 300 or more pages in length each, and the online repository provides significant savings in transmittal of these packages to the Trustees, as well as providing powerful search capabilities to find documents pertaining to a specific issue.
The implementation at IRCC has grown to more than one million images that are managed online. You don’t have to be a compliance specialist to see the document management opportunities created by FERPA and public records laws.