January 05, 2026
Industrial engineering students reimagined the data ingestion process for a health care provider for their capstone project, which could save the client nearly $200,000 annually.
Mizzou Engineering invests in hands-on learning experiences. Senior capstone projects are just one way we prepare students for their future careers and advance solutions to real-world issues. These group projects encourage innovation, creative problem solving and collaboration.
Here’s how a team of industrial engineering students reimagined the data ingestion process for a health care provider.
Team
Caden Davis, Will Mastrantuono and Jason Williams
Challenge
The core problem was a significant bottleneck in the patient intake process at Burrell Behavioral Health connection centers. The system relies on patients filling out paper forms, which intake technicians then manually transcribe into the electronic health record system. This redundancy was costing Burrell Behavioral Health valuable labor time — approximately five minutes per client — which degraded service capacity, increased staff workload, and led to longer wait times for clients seeking crucial mental health services.
Process
We used standard industrial engineering, systems engineering and process improvement methodologies. Our process followed these key steps:
- Define and measure: We rigorously defined the manual transcription as the non-value-added bottleneck and measured its time cost (five minutes saved per client).
- Analyze: We determined that the high volume required an automated, scalable solution rather than simply adding more staff or using expensive, off-the-shelf software.
- Design and improve: We developed a custom, plug-and-play digital intake platform. This solution automates the data ingestion process using specific database connectors, eliminating the manual typing step. This effectively changes the technician’s role from data entry to data validation and review.
- Control: We built the solution to be replicable and designed a straightforward implementation plan for deployment across all 38 Burrell Behavioral Health locations.
Results
The results provide a strong economic justification for immediate adoption.
• Time savings: Our solution reduces the intake process time by five minutes per client.
• Capacity gain (single site): For one connection center, this reclaims approximately 21 hours of staff time per month, translating to over $5,100 in annual savings.
• Scaled ROI: When scaled across all 38 Burrell locations, the projected total annual savings exceed $195,900.
• FTE impact: Most importantly, this financial saving represents over 720 full-time equivalent hours annually being repurposed from clerical transcription back into patient-facing care, directly improving service quality and capacity.
Lessons learned
The most significant learning experience was understanding the absolute priority of non-economic constraints in the health care sector.
While our code-base is complete and delivers a clear ROI, the solution cannot go live until it undergoes mandatory internal privacy and cybersecurity configuration. This taught us that in complex industries, compliance and regulatory constraints often outweigh even the most compelling economic justifications in the immediate implementation phase.
We had to build a system that was not just efficient, but inherently secure and configurable. We also had to expand our programming knowledge to build a suitable product.
Conclusion
We are excited for the client to complete the necessary security clearance, as this is the final blocker to realizing the nearly $200,000 in annual savings of repurposed FTE.