Mobile Inspector Case Study 

The Client 

Minnesota Department of Human Services

The Minnesota Department of Human Services touches the lives of one in four Minnesotans with a variety of services intended to help people live as independently as possible. DHS is the state's largest agency, with an annual budget of nearly $11 billion and approximately 7,200 employees located throughout Minnesota.

The Minnesota Department of Human Services, in cooperation with counties, licenses approximately 24,500 service providers and monitors and investigates their compliance with Minnesota laws and rules. The purpose of licensing is to protect the health, safety and rights of those receiving services. This is accomplished by requiring that providers meet minimum standards of care and physical environment requirements.

The licensing process is a massive operation starting in the legislature with laws created to protect children and vulnerable adults. These laws have to be interpreted and operationalized into checklists which the Licensing Division can use as their inspectors make regular and special visits to the numerous clinics and group homes around the state. In many cases, hundreds of data points were collected from each facility. These data points include items such as background checks, to educational levels, to postings, to physical features of the facility, to the existence of manuals and procedures and so on. All of this information was recorded on printed paper checklists and stored in vast file cabinets.

There were two main issues with the status quo; firstly, recording and transferring any data on the licensing of these facilities became very labor-intensive to the point of choking the information flow. Secondly, it was nearly impossible to provide other stakeholders such as the federal government, the media and citizens with easily accessible and comprehensive data. These twin challenges led the Licensing Division to seek out a partner with extensive experience in mobile computing. At an invitation-only trade show, MentorMate was "discovered" by the Licensing Division. In the words of their IT manager: "I've been looking for you guys for two years," he exclaimed when seeing our prior work including iQpakk, a mobile learning content management system.

The Challenge 

Hand-Written Reviews

The Department of Human Services is tasked with routinely reviewing service providers and re-issuing operational licenses. This involved creating lengthy checklists by hand; printing the checklists, each potentially hundreds of pages long; hand-writing review results and notes in the field; and finally, back at the office, hand-entering violations and citations into the Department's Licensing Information System.

Duplicate Data Entry

After performing a review, licensors were required to send a report to license holders detailing the items that failed to pass inspection. Licensors found themselves typing up notes and other information already written by hand on the review form.

Lack of Information

With so many services providers to review, licensors were unable to keep up with the workload. Typically only the most egregious violations were recorded electronically. The Licensing Information System had been developed to store the complete history of a license holder's citations, but in reality it only captured a fraction of the information.

Education and Prevention

Because only a limited number of data points were captured, the DHS and other stakeholders were unable to evaluate the types of issues that were most common. As a result, educational efforts aimed at service providers were less effective.

The Solution 

Legacy System Integration

Mobile Inspector integrated seamlessly with the DHS' existing process, adding new components on top of old. It also eliminated human data entry by automating the process each time a violation was entered on a mobile checklist.

Field Data Capture

By allowing licensors to enter data electronically in the field on a mobile device, MentorMate eliminated the need for duplicate data entry, saving licensors valuable time back at the office. After a final review, licensors are able to enter 100% of violations and citations directly into the Licensing Information System (LIS) with the click of a button. This eliminates not only the need to hand-enter each violation into the LIS, but also provides licensors with all their notes written in the field as raw material for writing review letters.

Data Access

Easily accessible and comprehensive data is available to the Department and its stakeholders because all data entered in the field is captured electronically.

Save Space and Paper

By creating an entirely electronic process, MentorMate saved the Department hundreds of pages of paper per review. Valuable floor space was also made available in an office building that was choked with numerous file cabinets.

Education

Information about past citations is synchronized to the inspector's mobile device prior to a review, allowing the licensor to see which items a service provider has violated in the past. This enables better-focused education, reducing the frequency of future violations.

Because administrators are able to get a birds-eye view of past citations across all license holders, better-focused informational and training materials can be produced, positively affecting violation rates across all licensed providers.