Baton Rouge General Medical Center is a regional hospital system serving the greater Baton Rouge, Louisiana area. The system operates across multiple locations anchored by the Bluebonnet, Mid City, and Ascension campuses, in addition to ancillary facilities including the Plaza, which houses administrative offices, and the Center for Health, an outpatient surgery and specialty services center. The mail operation project focused on Bluebonnet (the main campus, spanning multiple towers with distinct address ranges), Mid City, the Plaza, and Center for Health. The recipient population includes physicians, nurses, administrators, department directors, and affiliated clinic staff.
Mail delivery at a system of this complexity is never simple. A single piece of correspondence may arrive addressed to the main hospital but belong to a physician who works primarily at a satellite campus. Departments share suites, clinics rotate staff across locations, and in healthcare, certain inbound mail isn’t just administrative; it’s legally time-sensitive.
Challenge
Michelle Lacour, who conceived and drove the vision for a modernized mail operation at Baton Rouge General, described the core problem simply:
It is great to sort mail and put it in a bin, but if no one picks it up, or if the mail sorting is inaccurate, it doesn't get to the customer timely. So our biggest challenge was accuracy and timeliness.
At Baton Rouge General, the recipients aren’t just administrative staff. They’re providers, physicians, and clinical decision-makers whose inbound correspondence often directly affects patient care. A piece of mail that sits unclaimed in a bin isn’t just an inconvenience. It’s a gap in information that someone is waiting on to do their job.
The data that's coming over, the things that are coming into our mailroom, needs to get to them pretty quickly, or to at least make them aware that it is in Baton Rouge General at any of our locations.
The existing process had no mechanism for achieving this. Mail was sorted manually into bins and left for recipients to collect. With nothing to tell them something had arrived, physicians and administrators had to physically come down to the mailroom on the chance something was waiting. When they did make the trip, sorting errors meant what was in their bin wasn’t always theirs. A recipient might pick up 22 pieces and find that only 15 of them actually belonged to them, with no way to know where the other seven ended up, or whether the items missing from their own pile had arrived at all.
The challenge became even more complicated across campuses, where mail frequently needed to be routed between locations. Without a routing system, there was no reliable way to get it there or notify the physician it was in transit.
Michelle recognized that closing these gaps required dedicated ownership from someone with the postal expertise and organizational focus to build a structured operation from the ground up. The decision to create a Mail Management Coordinator role was a deliberate investment in getting it right.
When Lakiera Lomas stepped into that role in December 2024, she brought exactly what the moment required: eight years of USPS experience as a carrier, clerk, and postmaster relief, and the systematic instincts to match. Her job wasn’t just to manage the mailroom; it was to build it. Within her first weeks, she had developed a routing framework, department notification workflows, and repeatable processes that could be handed to anyone and followed consistently.
Every mailroom now has a structure and a starting point. That's what we set out to build.
The compliance risk healthcare can't ignore
In healthcare, medical records requests from attorneys and courts carry response deadlines of 7 to 14 days from receipt. When those letters arrive at a mailroom with no chain of custody and no notification system, the window starts closing before anyone in the right department even knows the letter exists.
It’s a risk that exists in every hospital mailroom operating without a documented intake process. Baton Rouge General recognized it and made closing that gap a core requirement of what they were building.
Solution
Baton Rouge General’s IT department, already overseeing the mailroom by default, identified the need for a platform that could bring structure to inbound letter mail operations. The requirements were clear: image capture of every incoming piece, automated recipient assignment and notification, multi-location routing, and documented chain-of-custody for every item received.
Received Digital was selected. Lakiera brought an added advantage to the platform deployment with her years of experience. She understood how mail systems work from the ground up, and she knew exactly what she needed the platform to do.
I've run a post office for 3 ZIP codes. So looking at one address — this is a piece of cake for me. I just had to figure out how to make it work for a clinic setting.
Designing a robust routing architecture
Lakiera’s first task was solving a problem that quietly undermines mail operations in large organizations: location codes that become obsolete the moment a department moves.
In a hospital environment, departments relocate constantly. A clinic that occupies Suite 310 this year may be in Suite 502 next year. If your routing is built around department names, every move creates a gap. Lakiera built the location structure in Received Digital around physical addresses instead, using address, tower, and suite number. The suite number inherently identifies the floor. The location is permanent. The occupants change. The system doesn’t break.
Bluebonnet’s main campus spans three distinct address ranges across multiple towers. Lakiera assigned each tower its own location code in the platform, then built out every suite within it in numerical order, mirroring exactly how the physical mailroom is organized. When mail arrives, the sorting sequence in the system matches the sorting sequence on the shelf.
The location is the location no matter what. The only thing that changes are the people occupying the suite. I wanted to make it so anyone could work behind me and understand how the system works.
She replicated this architecture at every campus, maintaining their operations using the same permanent-location logic she built at Bluebonnet.
Routing to the right recipients
Before a single piece of mail could be imaged and routed, Lakiera had to build the recipient structure from scratch. That meant visiting every department across every campus, identifying the designated pickup contacts for each suite, and configuring the platform’s assistant functionality, the feature that routes notifications to the right support staff rather than sending every physician a direct alert.
Michelle Lacour, Director of Mail Operations, described why this step was non-negotiable.
We could not live without the assistant functionality. For our organization, it's not one-to-one — 90% of our organization is not. So building it by department, visiting every single suite, identifying the assistants — that was how we had to lay ours out.
Bluebonnet went first, then Mid City, then Plaza, then Center for Health. Each campus required the same process of building every notification path. Before the last campus, Center for Health, came online, the teams there had already heard what was happening at Bluebonnet and were asking when they’d get it.
Benefits
Increased visibility for recipients
Before Received Digital, the only way a physician or administrator knew mail was waiting for them was to walk down to the mailroom and check. There was no notification, no visibility, no way to know whether making that trip was worth their time. Many didn’t bother, which meant mail could sit unclaimed.
The notification system changed that dynamic immediately. When the Bluebonnet campus went live, the response from staff was telling: departments that hadn’t rolled out yet were already asking when their campus would get access. Physicians who had spent years making unnecessary mailroom trips, or skipping them altogether, suddenly had a reason to act on their correspondence the same day it arrived.
The notification includes an image preview of the item itself, giving the recipient enough context to judge its urgency before they ever leave their desk. A physician expecting a time-sensitive legal notice knows immediately whether what arrived requires same-day action. Someone waiting on routine correspondence can plan accordingly. The trip to the mailroom becomes a choice, not a guessing game.
People don’t have enough hours in a day as it is, and they don’t want to come down 10 times to see if what they were waiting for is here yet. …People started talking and saying, ‘When are you going to get to Center for Health? I saw what you did at Bluebonnet. When are you going to get over to our location?’
In a clinical environment, the notification is more than just a convenience, it’s an accountability mechanism. The right person is alerted the moment their correspondence arrives, and the platform records that the notification was sent.
Reduced throughput time
The clearest measure of what changed is throughput time. Before Received Digital, clearing accumulated mail involved identifying where items belonged, locating physicians who had moved, determining what needed to be forwarded, and tracking down what had been sitting unclaimed. That process took three to four weeks of intermittent effort with no consistent process. Today, hundreds of pieces of mail are processed in 30 minutes. Items are imaged, recipients are notified, and mail is sorted to pickup slots in the order that matches the physical mailroom layout.
It used to take 3 to 4 weeks to get through the full process, including pick up. Today mail is being picked up the same day or next day in many cases.
Documentable compliance
Healthcare organizations operate under HIPAA’s requirement to safeguard protected health information at every point of handling, including inbound paper correspondence. An untracked piece of mail containing PHI, a medical records request with no documented receipt, or a legal notice that never reached the right department are audit exposures.
Since implementation, every piece of mail received across all four campuses has an image, a timestamp, and a routing record. When a department asks about a specific letter, the answer isn’t “we’re not sure.” It’s a quick search in the platform. If an item was received, it was imaged. If it isn’t in the system, it didn’t arrive. That’s a statement Lakiera can make with confidence because she designed the process to make it true.
If someone comes to me and asks about a letter, I can go back in and tell them exactly what it looks like and when it was received. If it's not in the system, we don't have it — and we know that because everything has been sorted and imaged.
For a healthcare organization managing HIM compliance and court-ordered medical records production, this is the difference between a defensible audit trail and institutional exposure. The question of whether a subpoena letter was received now has a verified answer.
Scalable operations
In any mailroom operation, when the person who knows how everything works leaves, the operation typically leaves with them. Routing logic lives in someone’s head. Department contacts are known only to the person who built the relationships. The next person starts over.
Lakiera designed the Baton Rouge General operation specifically to prevent that. The permanent location architecture, documented department notification paths, and numerical sorting structure mean that any trained staff member can step in and run the operation consistently. Lakiera tested this in real time by leaving for two to four days at a time and returning to find everything running exactly as designed.
I can be gone for 2, 3, 4 days and the system can be leveraged by anyone on my team.
That institutional durability was one of the core goals when the role was created. The operation doesn’t belong to any one person. It belongs to the system.
Conclusion
Before Received Digital, night shift staff, including nurses, technicians, and administrators, were regularly making trips to the mailroom to check for items they were hoping had arrived. That meant clinical and support staff were pulling time and attention away from their primary roles to chase down correspondence that may or may not have been there. That cost adds up fast.
Today, day shift processes and routes all inbound mail, notifications go directly to designated department contacts the moment items are imaged, and night shift has no reason to enter the mailroom at all. The mailroom runs clean, and the rest of the organization benefits from it.
Baton Rouge General is now fully live across all four campuses and is continuing its partnership with Received Digital, well into their second year. The immediate focus is bringing the full automation capabilities of the platform to each location and standardizing operations as the multi-campus team continues to develop. The mail operation that didn’t exist 18 months ago is now the operational model for how a multi-campus healthcare system manages inbound correspondence.
Every mailroom has to have a blueprint. Received Digital brings a structure to mail delivery that makes it a lot easier. From there, you can teach anybody how to work in a mailroom.
