Trillium Family Services Replaces Email, Fax, and Consumer File Sync With One Files.com Exchange

Trillium Family Services is an Oregon nonprofit provider of behavioral and mental healthcare for children, teens, and families. Its services span residential, outpatient, and community-based programs, with a records function responsible for exchanging protected health information (PHI) with outside organizations.

Care never happens inside one organization. Patient records move between Trillium and outside organizations as children receive treatment and return to their schools or communities. At each of those handoffs, the child’s medical record has to move between Trillium and an organization Trillium does not control.

With Files.com, Trillium replaced email, fax, and consumer file sync with one governed exchange that outside organizations could use without creating accounts or installing software.

Patient Records Moved by Email, Fax, and a Consumer Sync Account

The transport for those records was the one most of healthcare still uses. Records went out and came in as email attachments and faxes, with a consumer file-sync account running alongside them as a third channel.

The three-channel mix fragmented a single records workflow across email, fax, and consumer file sync. A request for a patient’s complete medical history could also produce a file far too large to send as an email attachment.

Email and fax survived for the reason they survive across healthcare: every counterparty can use them. The organizations on the other side of an exchange are not Trillium’s to manage. They cannot be told to install software or to hold accounts on Trillium’s systems before a record can move. Any replacement had to be as easy for the sender as attaching a file to an email. If it was not, email would come back.

A Password-Protected Front Door for Outside Partners

Files.com met that requirement while keeping each exchange inside an access-controlled boundary covered by a HIPAA business associate agreement (BAA). It became the single point of exchange for patient records: inboxes took files in, share links sent them out, and the whole surface sat under Trillium’s signed BAA with Files.com.

Trillium set up password-protected Files.com Inboxes for departments receiving files from outside. An organization with a record to send opened the department’s page, entered the password, and uploaded, with no account to create and nothing to install. Each uploader saw only its own session, never what another organization had sent, and the file landed in the correct department’s controlled folder.

Share links carried records in the other direction. The recipient followed a link and downloaded the file in a browser, again without an account. A share link could carry a complete medical history in a single transfer, at sizes email could not accept.

Three Transports Replaced by One Governed Exchange

With the Files.com workflow in production, Trillium replaced three separate transports for patient records with one governed exchange.

• Patient medical records now move to and from outside organizations through a single access-controlled surface covered by a signed HIPAA BAA. Email, fax, and the consumer sync account are out of the records path.
• Outside partners send records with nothing asked of them beyond a web page and a password. The reason email and fax persisted, that every counterparty could use them, now applies to the replacement.
• A complete patient medical history, far too large for email, goes out as one share link and one download.
• What began in a single department now runs intake for departments across the organization, and bringing on the next one is another inbox, not another project.

A Web Page and a Password Instead of a Fax Number

Trillium did not get PHI off email and fax by building a patient portal, and it did not ask its partners to change how they work. It gave them somewhere better to send the files. On the outside, the Files.com front door asks less of a partner than email did. On the inside, it gives Trillium what email never could: one boundary around every record that moves, with the organization’s own controls on it.