Chicago Department of Health

Chicago Department of Public Health

To contact the Chicago Department of Public Health, visit www.cityofchicago.org

The Department had over 1,000,000 pieces of information in paper format that needed to be accessible to numerous departments. City personnel spent 30 minutes searching for every document request on average and the act of photocopying/replacing the file took 10 minutes. Multiple facilities for storing paper files were utilized. This department also had no IT staff.

Edge provided services (Welfare to Work Program participants) that scanned in over 1,000,000 documents into IMEDGE, then provided a facility for hosting this information at Edge facilities for remote retrieval and storage.

The process of retrieving file folders and making copies of the information was cut from 30 minutes to seconds. Because these files were digitized (Edge's Welfare to Work Initiative) and stored offsite in Edge's Data Hosting Facility, no additional IT staff was required and physical storage space was freed up for alternative uses. Worker productivity was improved dramatically and the risk of losing/misplacing very valuable files was negated to almost zero.