Health Association Nova Scotia is a service association for a health and health-related organizations. It is also not-for-profit, non-government, and member-based. The members of Health Association Nova Scotia include the Nova Scotia Health Authority, the IWK Health Centre, the majority of nursing homes in Nova Scotia, all government funded home care agencies and a growing number of private agencies, adult residential centers/regional rehabilitation centers, and residential care facilities. As a result, staff travel between different facilities, but have found it difficult at times to access files via the virtual private network (VPN) of the Health Association Nova Scotia, owing to the strict Internet usage rules of the other facilities. Resolution of this issue was a pressing need.

The challenge to Health Association Nova Scotia was a sizable one, as Steve Quinn from the association relates: “We needed to provide access to internal files quickly and easily for mobile employees.” While a web based product might have sufficed, “the preference was to have this access from their smartphones.” In addition, the solution to be chosen had to be simple, efficient and effective in its deployment. In the complex world of HIPAA-style regulations, network security, and user access rights, the last thing the association wanted was an overly complex application that robbed them of time for other important IT activities.

The association looked at several different options. While some vendors matched some of FileCloud’s functionality, no single vendor could offer all of FileCloud’s possibilities or ease of deployment. Rapidly, the shortlist was reduced to one final solution, FileCloud. Steve Quinn and his team put the FileCloud solution into operation, backed up by the renowned FileCloud support resources. The broad-based membership of Health Association Nova Scotia was at last no longer an obstacle to efficient and productive work by employees as they moved from one member’s site to another.

Besides solving the firewall access issues, FileCloud has a number of other attributes that are crucial to the efficiency and smooth running of Health Association Nova Scotia operations. The intuitive user interface lets users quickly and easily access the files they need to perform their work of providing group benefits solutions, clinical engineering services, labor relations, and compensation analysis, as well as administering the Nova Scotia Health Employees’ Pension Plan (NSHEPP.) The powerful controls integrated into FileCloud allow administrators to limit the maximum number of downloads of a shared file, trigger the expiry of a share after a certain time, limit or prevent downloads, and generally manage a dynamic environment in which users may be connecting from several different places in the course of a week or even a day.

Health data must often be certified as being held within a specified physical or regional boundary. Many public cloud solutions lack this control. On the other hand, Health Association Nova Scotia is able guarantee compliance by deploying its own instance of FileCloud. There is an additional advantage, in that control is clearly exerted by the in-house IT team that understands the criticality of protecting confidential healthcare data. Besides making in-house deployment easy, FileCloud also offers advanced security and audit features for Steve Quinn’s team to demonstrate compliance with regulations, and makes it easy to integrate with any existing internal authentication system for access.

Healthcare professionals often do not have the time or the space to take portable PCs or even tablets with them. Always on the go, they have come to rely on smartphones as the best compromise between lightweight, easy to carry devices and sufficient computing power and memory to let them get their work done. Not every device is equipped with office automation applications, like Microsoft Word, Excel, or PowerPoint. However, with FileCloud, this poses no problem. The standard feature of OpenOffice integration with FileCloud allows users to view common file formats within the web browser of their smartphones, without having to buy or install the underlying application.

Whether your organization is in government or business, FileCloud is also available to you for your own private cloud storage, synchronization and sharing solution. You can deploy for groups of users from a few dozens to millions, all with FileCloud’s secure, productive, cost-effective file sharing and synchronization. Contact FileCloud today to find out more and to try FileCloud for free on your own server for 14 days.