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| A Very Successful EBRS Rollout! |
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Congratulations to everyone! We had a very successful EBRS rollout this year. The main issues that came up were of the, “How do I do this or that?” which is typical when learning a new system. We had planned for these and believe that our training program reduced the number of issues that we might otherwise have needed to address.
The only major unexpected problem was trouble with the fingerprint signatures, which took some time to resolve. We know this was frustrating to you and appreciate your (sometimes reluctant) patience with the system while we investigated and resolved the issue.
Where are we now?
As of May 11th, we have 281 birth certifiers enrolled in EBRS and during the first four months of the year, we registered 16,055 births. Of these, 5,590 (35%) had a Voluntary Acknowledgment of Paternity which, as you know, takes additional time to process. We had a backlog of these in our office but were able to re-assign staff to get caught up. The next article contains some things that you can do to speed up paternity processing.
There were also some delays in processing the automatic Social Security Number requests, which is known as Enumeration At Birth, or EAB. Troubleshooting the cause of these delays took some time, but they have been resolved and the EAB files are now going regularly to the Social Security Administration.
Midwives and Birthing Centers are using EBRS!
We are very excited that with EBRS midwives and freestanding birthing centers can now enter birth certificates electronically! We have trained 43 midwives on EBRS since March and they have electronically entered 90 birth certificates to date. We also provided training to an additional 20 midwives about the changes in the 2008 birth certificate and paternity process.
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| AOP Reminders... |
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The following are things to verify before sending the Form 45-31, Voluntary Acknowledgment of Paternity (AOP) to our office. Paying attention to these items will help ensure that the paternity information is processed in a timely fashion. This allows parents to get their child’s birth certificate and for the record to go to Social Security quickly. These will also be discussed in greater detail in the next issue of our Birth Matters newsletter, including more information about the law changes that affected the paternity process.
- Please make sure that you are using the correct form, Form 45-31, Voluntary Acknowledgment of Paternity, if the acknowledgment was made and witnessed in your facility within 5 days of birth. Also make sure that you are using the current (2008) version of the form.
- Ensure that all of the information on the AOP matches the information in the electronic record, or it will be rejected. (We are planning to allow printing of the AOP from within the EBRS application, with much of the information pre-filled, but this won’t be available until sometime this Fall.)
- In order to use the AOP, the marital status in the electronic record must be set to “No.”
- Please write the EBRS Case ID number (legibly) in the upper left margin of the AOP. This greatly speeds up our locating the matching electronic record. Also, you do not need to attach a working copy of certificate to the AOP; the Case ID is sufficient.
- Ensure that the parents have their copy of the AOP and that you send the original and DCS copies to our office as soon as possible. Do not wait and send them only once a week. Postage-paid envelopes are available from our office for this purpose and if you need more you can download the supplies order form at: www.oregon.gov/DHS/ph/chs/registration/docs/45-43.pdf. If you have any questions about ordering envelopes or other forms, you may contact Mary Ann Jenson at 971-673-1154.
- There is no charge when using AOP form 45-31 to record the father’s information in a birth record. There is a fee to have certified copies of the birth certificate made.
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| EBRS Tricks, Tips and Tidbits |
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The following tips should help make completion of the birth certificate easier and faster for you.
- If you are entering a Post Office Box as a mailing address, leave the street number field blank and enter the entire box address in the Street Name field: PO Box 12345. (You will need to save an override for having a blank street number field.) Also, if you have an apartment or suite number, enter just the number/letter in the field. Do not include a number sign or the “No.” abbreviation.
- The mother’s maiden name is a mandatory field on the birth certificate. The only time you should enter Unknown is if the mother unexpectedly left the hospital before completing the work sheet and you cannot contact the mother or informant for this information.
- Suffixes: The abbreviation Jr. is a suffix and should be entered in the appropriate suffix field, not the last name field. For example John Public, Jr. should be entered with Public in the Last Name field and Jr. in the suffix field. This also applies to Sr., III, etc. Do not use periods or commas in any names.
- If the mother is married but does not want to list her husband as the father, you should leave the information on the Father page blank – do not put Unknown in the fields. You should also add a comment into the record about the husband not being entered as the father. You will have to save some overrides before being able to certify these records.
- You can amend multiple fields with one amendment in EBRS, which saves you time. On the Amendment page, after entering the first field to be corrected, simply click the “New Item” button and select the next field to change. You can continue this for as many fields as need to be amended in the birth certificate. The only time you need to make two separate EBRS amendments is when you need to amend both parent and facility items, since those are different amendment types. Complete a “Correction Affidavit < 1 year” amendment type to amend the parent fields and then complete a “Statistical Correction” amendment type to change the facility fields.
- Home births only: If you are submitting a certificate for a home birth where there was no Attendant, you should enter 99 for the 5-minute APGAR and also enter a comment in the record that no APGAR score was taken.
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| Let Us Know About Staff Turnover |
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If you have staff in your office who are EBRS users, you need to let us know when those staff leave your office. Then we can change their account settings so they can no longer access your birth certificates. Because this is a Web-based system, your facility needs to be very active in controlling access to the records created on behalf of the facility. Prompt notice of terminated or transferred employees is an important part of this security.
If you want to add new staff to the EBRS system, simply complete a user enrollment form (available on our OVERS Web site) and fax it to us. We will create a user account and send the login information. After the user has successfully logged into the system and changed their password, they can then contact your local county vital records office and make an appointment to have their identification confirmed and their fingerprints entered into the system. Or you can call our office to see if any of our staff may soon be in your area soon and will be able to enroll the fingerprints in person.
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| PDF Version of OVERS News |
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The sections above contain all of the articles in OVERS News, Issue 8. You can also get a pdf file of the original printed newsletter.
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