Customer Stories
Olly Neal Community Health Center
OnBoard’s Minutes Builder, eSignatures, and document storage capabilities streamline operations for this eastern Arkansas-based health care provider’s board of directors.
Customer Stories
OnBoard’s Minutes Builder, eSignatures, and document storage capabilities streamline operations for this eastern Arkansas-based health care provider’s board of directors.
Industries: Health care, nonprofits
Headquarters: Marianna, Arkansas
Board Management Goals
Results
As Kellee Farris talks, she beams with pride at the Olly Neal Community Health Center’s sprawling new facility. You can see the previous facility out her office window.
“The community seems happy with it, so we’re happy,” says Kellee, the center’s CEO.
The building isn’t the only thing that’s new. The nonprofit community health center, which was founded in 1969 as Lee County Cooperative Clinic, rebranded in 2024. Olly Neal, the Center’s namesake, is a Lee County native and Marianna resident. He was the first Black prosecuting attorney in Arkansas, and served on the Arkansas Court of Appeals from 1996 through 2007 and remains active in the community.
The health center provides a multitude of services for residents in Lee, Phillips, and St. Francis counties. “Primary care, dental, pharmacy, health education, transportation, case management … you name it, we probably do it,” Kellee says. “We try to make sure that anyone in our community, not just our patients, has access to great quality care.”
Olly Neal Community Health Center currently operates out of four clinics and boasts 45 employees. Its 10-member, all-volunteer board of directors meets monthly and includes six additional committees: executive, QI, compliance, finance, nominations, and personnel.
They meet mostly in a hybrid format, and while board members can serve up to two three-year terms, they can serve indefinitely with a two-thirds majority vote by the other board members that occurs every three years.
Prior to OnBoard, Kellee, her administrative assistant, and the board operated with a traditional paper-based program. As a Federally Qualified Health Center (FQHC), this became problematic whenever operational visits took place.
“We were paper-based and headache-based,” Kellee says, laughing. “We wanted to be more efficient and have a space where the governance and board documents could be readily available. We were struggling with preparing for operational site visits, searching for those documents and not having consistent documentation and knowing exactly where to find everything.”
Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA) officials conduct these visits, which typically last about three days, once every three years on average, to assess compliance and service delivery. “They’re asking for minutes, specific meetings, ‘When did you approve which specific policy?’” Kellee says. “Our minutes weren’t efficient.”
In addition to paper-trail struggles, Kellee says it was common to wait until the next meeting — one month later — for signatures to important documents. Building board books and taking meeting minutes were additional headaches.
“It was terrible, getting ready to do the minutes, and my assistant was like, ‘Do you have this note? I missed this,’” Kellee says.
— Kellee Farris, CEO, Olly Neal Community Health Center
Kellee discovered OnBoard while attending a finance operations management conference in Las Vegas in 2022. She visited OnBoard’s booth at the event and made the purchase almost immediately.
“When we saw it, I knew it was a no-brainer,” Kellee says. “I signed the contract that day. I didn’t wait.”
From there, it was time to present her volunteer board with a Christmas gift: iPads, already uploaded with OnBoard. Kellee says the implementation process was efficient and easy for everyone involved.
“We signed our contract in October, and by December we were ready to roll it out to the board and have everything ready to go for them,” Kellee recalls. “The first several months and into the next year, we had several meetings where we were getting training, making sure we understood the features. After that, it’s been hands-off because we haven’t needed (help) as much. It’s so easy to use.”
Olly Neal Community Health Center has only added one board member since then, and she received 1-on-1 training to get her up to speed on the platform. In addition, the Center’s compliance officer provides training sessions at the start of each board meeting. Occasionally, those trainings include a refresher course on OnBoard’s features.
“It was an easy sell,” Kellee says of the switch from paper to digital. “We didn’t have any pushback. We had a couple of board members that still wanted a paper copy of the board book, but one of the board members is still utilizing OnBoard as well.”
Kellee added one other aspect that made the switch easy to approve.
“It was affordable,” she says. “We’re a smaller FHQC. Budget is always a hard conversation. It was affordable and it met a need.”
Given the Community Center’s past headaches with meeting minutes, it’s no surprise that the Minutes Builder capability was a favorite. But Kellee couldn’t stop raving about it.
“As an FQHC our minutes have to show the titles of policies, so when we’re getting ready to have a site visit, they’re wanting to see where the board approved specific policies,” Kellee says. “Being able to move it over into the minutes, it decreases the errors we were having in site visits. We were having that issue for years. Now it’s just there.”
In the past, Kellee says it was common to have to wait until the next board meeting — one month later — to obtain signatures for minutes approval and other documents. Now, thanks to the eSignatures capability, which enables board members to send and sign agreements securely from any device, that process is shortened considerably.
“In between the meetings, we’d have to wait until the next board meeting to get signatures if we needed to make changes,” Kellee explains. “As soon as the document is prepared, it’s uploaded and assigned to me and our board chair to sign, and we quickly get it signed. So, we’re not waiting a month to get it signed anymore.”
As for the board members themselves, OnBoard now serves as the central hub for all the board’s key documents, which makes it much easier for them to review documents and prepare for meetings.
“I had one board member say he really liked that he could go in and see documents whenever he wanted to look at them, even if it was from past board meetings or a policy,” Kellee says.
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