Operations Support for Vitals Department with Galveston County Health District (GCHD)

Case Study

Government

Public Health

CLIENT

Vitals Department at GCHD

The staff responsible for producing vitals documents at Galveston County Health Department

GOAL

Streamline Vital Documents Requests

Our client wished to migrate from an outdated vitals system and streamline the production of vital documents for public requests.

Their needs included:

No. 0

A low-cost document storage to store hundreds of thousands of vitals images

No. 1

A database to store metadata and referential data for vitals images

No. 2

A customer-facing application to submit vital document requests

No. 3

A way to digital manipulate vital documents for amendments and other adjustments

No. 4

A queue for staff to review and resolve requests

SOLUTION

Flourish Core + Impression

Our work included:

Migrating historical image data and metadata
Implementing a request intake and resolution process for staff
Deploying a series of tools of editing vital documents
Automating continuous intake of new vitals information from the county

Team members collaborated with the county health department to digitize, centralize, and automate the production and management of vital records – such as birth and death certificates – across multiple channels of resident engagement. The project began by assessing the state and location of historical data, which was stored in a legacy system called SPLASH. This system held hundreds of thousands of records, many in formats or with image qualities incompatible with modern processing tools.

We extracted this data into a secure, HIPAA-compliant, no-cost storage environment. Leveraging Salesforce, the team designed a custom data model and tailored views to represent different types of vital documents. For historical records, Flourish utilized Impression, one of the Flourish API’s that provides optical character recognition (OCR) functionality, to extract information from scanned documents and generate corresponding Salesforce records. Each record was uniquely structured to mirror the original document’s content while enabling easy updates and access.

To improve service delivery, we developed a centralized hub where vital records staff can search, review, modify, and fulfill document requests. Residents request documents in person, by phone, or via email. For walk-ins, wall-mounted tablets equipped with a fast intake form capture the necessary requester information. These forms automatically match incoming requests to existing records in the system, queuing them for staff review.

Staff can then claim requests, proceed through an integrated approval workflow, and generate the final document. Where amendments or formatting adjustments are needed – for instance, reorienting content or adding annotations – the hub allows staff to digitally manipulate the document before printing it on official certificate paper.

Lastly, we created an automated pipeline to ingest new vital events, like new births, in the system. This forms a clean source of truth for vitals across the county and creates a single process for old and new records alike.

Conclusion

Through Flourish’s Core and Impression products, the client was able to dramatically reduce manual workload and increase the speed and quality of service delivery of vital documents. This became critical to meet the high influx of resident requests even as financial support for county health departments began to wane in 2025.