The Foren­sic Tox­i­col­o­gy Lab­o­ra­to­ry set their sights toward improv­ing envi­ron­men­tal sus­tain­abil­i­ty with­in their lab­o­ra­to­ry. Their first goal – work­ing toward a paper­less elec­tron­ic work­flow. A daunt­ing task giv­en they oper­at­ed in a heavy paper-based sys­tem, using up to 500,000 pages of paper plus print­er con­sum­ables annually.

An elec­tron­ic case file man­age­ment solu­tion was rapid­ly imple­ment­ed to meet the demands dur­ing the pan­dem­ic, which accel­er­at­ed their goal of mov­ing to a paper­less sys­tem. Paper­less work­flows were devel­oped and imple­ment­ed util­is­ing exist­ing tech­nolo­gies. All doc­u­ments were con­vert­ed to a dig­i­tal for­mat, new com­put­ers with greater pro­cess­ing pow­er pur­chased, remote net­work access and increased net­work capa­bil­i­ties intro­duced, includ­ing vir­tu­al access to instrumentation.

Since imple­ment­ing the paper­less work­flow, the Foren­sic Tox­i­col­o­gy Lab­o­ra­to­ry has reduced the annu­al paper con­sump­tion by approx­i­mate­ly 95% and saved near­ly 1.5 mil­lion pieces of paper. In addi­tion, they have great­ly reduced the asso­ci­at­ed print­er con­sum­ables, print­er main­te­nance, over 10,000 mani­la fold­ers, and many oth­er types of sta­tionery consumables.