In accordance with the Oklahoma Chiropractic Practice Act, the Oklahoma Board of Chiropractic Examiners (OBCE) regulates the chiropractic profession in the state of Oklahoma, ensuring licensed chiropractors and new entrants meet the high professional standards required to practice. As a self-funded agency with two full-time administrative staff, adopting the most efficient and cost-effective processes possible is critical to best serve its 1,000 licensees and protect the public interest.

An ambitious goal calls for licensing transformation

In 2007, Executive Director Beth Kidd set an ambitious goal for the agency to go 100% paperless. But to achieve this target, the team would need to transform the outdated paper-based licensing and complaints processes that required mailing thousands of forms and documents each year. These manual processes were not only costly, adding up to thousands of dollars in mailing expenses per year, but also unreliable – the team estimates that up to 25% of information would get lost in the mail, causing issues for both staff and chiropractors.

After resolving to transition to fully digital processes, OBCE implemented an online system to facilitate license renewals for its licensees. But new applications were still processed manually, meaning that application packets containing five or more pages of information needed to be mailed to each new applicant, at a cost of about $3 per envelope incurred by the agency. Complaints were also still processed manually, which required members of the public to print, fill out and mail a complaint form to OBCE – and then wait for it to reach them – before an investigation could be initiated.

Even for license renewals, the process was labor intensive and caused frequent headaches for staff. Renewals and payments were still accepted by mail in addition to the new online portal, and only about 60% of licensees renewed online. For those who opted to renew by mail, staff would have to manually enter information into multiple platforms that didn’t integrate with each other.

“We had a lot of problems with the old portal that we used to use,” says Administrative Assistant Lauren Arnold, explaining further that in addition to staff concerns, chiropractors found accessing and using the system difficult when renewing their licenses.