Our Vital Records team handles more than 600 mail-in requests for birth and death certificates each week. The average wait time for mail-in certificates had been nearly 4 weeks…too slow in anybody’s book. Last month we established a cross-functional quality improvement team to find and implement ways to reduce the turnaround time. We now have some great results to show for our effort.
By implementing interventions including a tool that allows our staff to view the backlog real-time and change staff responsibilities to match demand, we’ve reduced our turn-around time by more than 75%…to just 5 days. A secondary benefit was the decrease in phone calls from customers who wanted to know when they could expect to get their birth or death certificates…which freed up staff time to stay on task on other job duties.
Congratulations to the team members for making a huge difference for our customers. Thanks go out to the entire Vital Records Operations Team as well as Nancy Flores, Robin Rodriquez, Esther Castro, Jeff Bloomberg, Krystal Colburn, and Bernie Sanden. Well done!
