FILESTREAM & THEIR CLIENT OF 17 YEARS (a confidential client)

We are a company with a 25 year history in healthcare within the world of elite sport across many disciplines. 

We facilitate elite athletes to access health care quickly, efficiently, and discreetly within the private sector.

WHAT DOES THE BUSINESS DO?

We have a team of about 25 people and we manage our clients, most of many years’ standing. Due to the nature of our work security of data are integral to our operation.

WHAT’S YOUR ROLE?

I’m one of the directors.

WHAT ISSUES WERE YOU EXPERIENCING BEFORE YOU STARTED WORKING WITH FILESTREAM?

Our system 17 years ago was utilising secure and locked filing cabinets held in a vault within our premises. These cabinets held 100,000s of documents and were in secure, below-ground storage. Although filed well and indexed, this meant staff having to go up and down throughout the day to retrieve any files needed.

WHAT MADE YOU CONSIDER MAKING A CHANGE?

We have always embraced technology and are always looking to work ‘smarter’ as well as improving efficiencies and minimising risk.  We could see, even then, that Cloud storage was going to be the future.  We had an introduction to Filestream and employed them to support us with their software.

HOW DID THE FILMSTEAM RELATIONSHIP BEGIN?

We knew it was not going to be a quick fix. With more than 250,000 documents to manage and growing, that’s a big task to get that transferred in a secure and easily accessible way. There were inevitably to be some frustrations along the way on both sides. However we worked through these together to produce a secure solution that can be used by our team and it was adapted to suit the particular nature of our business. Even to this day, this continues to be an evolutionary process and partnership with Filestream.

WHAT HAVE THE BENEFITS BEEN?

Many. It saved time and money. There is no doubt, had we not done this then ten years ago we would have had to employ ‘document clerks’ simply retrieve documents all day long!

It also freed up space in our building and avoided us having to take additional secure space for storage elsewhere once we’d outgrown our own space. That was a headache we did not have to consider.

The other thing now is that document retrieval is almost instant, which is of considerable help and enables us to continue to drive efficiencies and accuracy.

WHAT ABOUT SECURITY?

The nature of our business is such that security is of paramount importance. We have our own highly skilled IT specialists to safeguard this and Filestream is part of our security solution. We hold potentially sensitive and personal data about individuals, which may only be managed by clearly defined parties when appropriate. Our systems, of which Filestream is an integral part, are well managed and include robust security.