Caliber’s Online RMS
Caliber Public Safety, among many other products, produces Online RMS, a Records Management System that offers your municipality or agency many advantages. A police records management system, like any other records management system, can make every aspect of your agency run more smoothly and efficiently. Image API posted an article last year explaining some of the advantages of Records Management Systems in general. These absolutely are applicable to police records management systems.
First and foremost, police records management systems like Online RMS help improve workflows and make records retrieval more efficient. As Image API asserted, “most agencies don’t analyze the time spent on storing or searching for records, so it’s difficult to know how much time is wasted in the process. But when documents are stored onsite in overflowing file cabinets, there’s no doubt a lot of time is lost while trying to recover relevant information. Worse yet, after records have been retrieved, they’ll eventually need to be refiled, which takes up additional hours that could be better used elsewhere within the office…information is only useful when it can be retrieved; if you’re unable to access your files when (or how often) you need, there’s almost no point in storing them at all.”
A police records management system like Online RMS, by contrast, makes retrieving records fast and efficient. Finding the records is similarly easy. Online RMS, for example, provides many different options and fields for searching relevant data for incidents, suspects, related information, and cross-indexed data from other databases where. Sharing data electronically through a police records management system also means that multiple agencies can potentially benefit from the same pool of data.
An ancillary benefit of a police records management system is compliance-related. There are numerous regulations with which municipalities and their agencies must comply, including HIPAA. A police records management system makes it much easier to safeguard sensitive information and control access to that information, while also ensuring dissemination of the data is done in compliance with the various regulatory requirements.
More practically, there are significant cost savings involved when a police records management system is in place. Handling records “demands considerable time and money due to locating adequate storage space and printing or filing all your physical forms. Fortunately, with proper records management, your agency can gain control over the growth of its records and be sure it retains the most relevant or pertinent data.” The article goes on to explain that digital police records management systems reduce storage fees and improve team efficiency (by reducing time spent searching for lost or misplaced files).
Safeguarding data, minimizing the risk of litigation for mishandling data, and even boosting agency morale (because the police records management system reduces the chaos of manual record-keeping), are all benefits of implementing a police records management system. When you add up everything a police records management system can do for you and your agency (like Caliber’s Online RMS), it should be obvious that the benefits far outweigh the very manageable cost and start-up time associated with implementing such a system. Police records management systems, online or “in the cloud,” are the future of records management for law enforcement. It’s time more municipalities embraced the many benefits that an online police records management system can afford.
