Introducing Mick, Director of Business Operations at Oregon Health Authority

It’s always a treat to be able to share our customers’ inspiring success stories. For this spotlight, we’re happy to introduce Mick Mitchell from Oregon Health Authority (OHA).

Created in 2009, OHA oversees the state’s many behavioral and public health initiatives as well as the Oregon Health Plan, the state’s expanded implementation of Medicaid.

Mick became part of the OHA team in 2010, bringing a solid background in Six Sigma to implement lean practices, improve process performance and tackle troublespots head-on. In 2017, Mick was made Director of Operations for OHA’s Health Systems division, and his skills would prove vital to helping the agency adapt to the COVID-19 pandemic. Read more about how OHA tapped Docusign Professional Services to meet its unique CLM implementation needs and ambitious timelines.

When the pandemic hit, OHA faced a double-sided challenge. The agency was on the front lines of handling a public health crisis, but at the same time, it also needed to keep onboarding partners and vendors while most OHA employees worked from home. We talked to Mick about his partnership with Docusign and his experience using Professional Services to get CLM up and running quickly.

Where did your journey with Docusign begin?

We actually started with some discussions prior to COVID around some of our contracting process needs. And coincidentally, just as we were having those conversations with our program staff and leadership, the pandemic really hit, and that set a lot of things in motion for us. Our challenges—being dependent on paper processes and wet ink signatures—were probably not new to most organizations, but they became more apparent during the pandemic as most of OHA’s workforce had to work remotely. 

How did you ultimately decide on using Docusign CLM?

We looked at some of your competitors, and we still didn't see the level of flexibility in those systems that we were going to need for these workflows. The other part was that Docusign is a brand that is well known for its trustedness, and we had to work very thoroughly with our Department of Justice in looking over the security of the system.

What did your process look like before moving to CLM? 

There was a lot of printing manual folders and information archiving. Our program staff and contracts team would do an iterative process back and forth until all the forms were completed, often inputting the same information on different forms multiple times. They would then work with our Office of Contracts and Procurement (OC&P) in another iterative process—and yet again with our Department of Justice for legal sufficiency review. The lead times could certainly stack up, and from the request of a new contract to its execution, the process was 90 days on average. And sometimes, they were going to the 200-300 day mark.

How did Docusign’s Professional Services team assist with your implementation?

From the beginning, Professional Services had a very well laid-out plan and strategy for the overall development and implementation. We've been working specifically with Rachel Hogan as our primary point of contact, and she's brought in technical specialists along the way. They’ve been able to do some pretty quick work around some heavy lifts for what we have asked for. We don't deny that we're a complex organization with complex requirements, but they were able to meet our needs in the timelines that we were asking for.

What impressed you most about working with the services team?

Something that really impressed me about working with Professional Services—and the whole Docusign experience—was the ability to tailor the system to the way we had already established business processes rather than us having to conform to Docusign. 

As a result, the new processes were already very familiar to everybody and easier to adjust to because it was the same process—just electronic. It was really impressive.

How quickly were you able to complete the implementation?

We started in July 2020 and launched in March 2021. A great amount of effort went in just to make sure that everything worked correctly, and we're very happy with the timeline.

What kind of benefits have you seen thus far?

With over 23 templates automatically generated in Docusign, including our base contract template, there’s very little that our people have to do to get the needed information into the document and out the door. Early indicators are showing an 80% gain in efficiencies, which is huge. We reduced the overall timeline from months down to less than six days.

And what we've put in the system so far is just the tip of the iceberg. We have other workflows that we're going to build out, and we're very happy with the expandability of the system.

Read OHA’s full Docusign success story.