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Improving In-Person Birth Certificates Service

We partnered with Boston’s Registry to decrease the amount of time it takes to get residents their personal documents.

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We used basic Process Improvement techniques to cut the time it takes to deliver birth certificates to constituents in-person by more than half. The Registry supplied constituents with over 16000 birth certificates in 2023.

Names of Contributors: Nolan Brown, Courtney Moores, Amy Hood, Tyler Loewenstein, Raman Singh

Year(s): 2023-2024

Why We Did This

Registry services are one of the City’s core functionalities.

Residents and City of Boston employees were frustrated with long lines, long wait times, and constituent confusion.

Constituents who order their certificates in-person often need to take time from their jobs, pay for parking, and need their vital information as soon as possible. Making the process as quick and easy as possible was critical to improving constituent experience with the Registry and the City of Boston as a whole.

What We Did

We tried many process improvement strategies, but a few stood out as particularly successful:

  1. We modified the form constituents used to order their birth certificates to remove unnecessary fields and inform them of next steps
  2. We put out desks and gave constituents a place to fill out their ordered slips
  3. We had a clerk sit at the window and put everything they need to process a certificate request within reach

Results

We’re intending to launch similar initiatives with the Marriages and Depositions Departments within the Registry

After collecting over 500 data points, we concluded that the average time it took for a constituent to receive their certificate, from start to finish, fell from about 12 minutes to about 5 minutes. Because the city gives out about 16000 birth certificates a year, these improvements will save Boston residents over 1750 hours a year and Registry clerks over 1500 hours a year.

Who's Involved

Who's Involved
Registry: Birth, Death, and Marriage
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