Solving veterinary healthcare challenges in innovative ways

By collecting just a few drops of your dog’s blood, IDEXX can detect Lyme disease. One single blood draw from your cat can tell you whether they have any of three common and deadly diseases.

With $3.2B in revenue in 2021, and a record and forecast for continued long-term growth, more than 85% of IDEXX’s revenue comes from companion animal veterinary diagnostics — a field with lots of room for innovation. IDEXX also has specific and deep expertise in animal cancer pathology and other specialized testing, enhancing and extending the lives of pets by providing veterinarians with diagnostic tests and services in over 80 labs around the world. In addition to pet healthcare, IDEXX develops cutting-edge products and services for the livestock and poultry, water testing, and dairy markets — fulfilling its purpose of protecting and keeping pets, people, and livestock healthy.

The entrepreneurial spirit is at the core of what IDEXX does, but as Ken Grady, Senior Vice President and Chief Information Officer at IDEXX, quips, “Innovation for the sake of innovation is useless. It’s got to be innovation with application.” ” 

Working with Box in the Content Cloud enables that for IDEXX. Grady says, “The approach that the Box team has taken to understand both our strategic drivers and our objectives has allowed us to have real conversations around what Box can do to create applicable, valuable innovation for IDEXX. That’s the key. I don’t care that it’s the latest thing, I care that it’s the right thing.”

Easy integration with already familiar content tools

Grady had just rolled out a cloud-based file-hosting service, so when approached by a colleague who wanted to pitch the Content Cloud, he thought, “Why would I need Box now?” He agreed to listen, though, and that was a turning point. At the end of the hour, he says, “I thought, uh oh, I’m going to have to buy this.”

Box enables swift collaboration among project stakeholders and offers the dynamic search and control features over content that IDEXX needed. Key to Grady’s mind change was the fact that Box has a strong Microsoft 365 integration, so employees could continue to use the tools they were familiar with — such as Microsoft Office — and IDEXX could ensure that all this content was held in a secure, centralized place: the Content Cloud. Plus, Box Relay gave IDEXX the advantage of robust workflow capability.

The game changer of automated workflows

The veterinary healthcare industry is different from human healthcare in several significant ways:

1. There are typically no third-party payers to contend with
2. There is a very different regulatory framework 
3. While there are data privacy regulations for any company, HIPAA doesn’t apply to pet records

What that means is that life sciences companies like IDEXX can innovate much faster, without the same regulatory overhead or the challenges of the human health insurance industry — as long as they have the right workflows in place to support that innovation.

IDEXX partnered with Box to replace its legacy enterprise content management (ECM) system, which had a variety of important workflows built in. To replace that paradigm, IDEXX adopted Box Relay, initially in its operations manufacturing division, and specifically around change requests. The ability to customize complex workflows, with all related content securely housed in one central place — the Content Cloud — made this transition easy for IDEXX.

Grady says, “Box Relay can handle reasonably complicated workflows, and then you get all the additional table stakes.” These included features like:

• Controlled access
• Inside internal and external sharing
• Monitoring and reporting features

“It was Relay that was the differentiator for us,” Grady confirms.

Swift migration and effortless security​​​​​​​

The IT challenge IDEXX first faced was how to migrate entire content structures within the control document environment and ensure permissions were correctly mapped. “Hierarchies work differently in the inbox than on the content server,” Grady says, “so that took some development work.” His team found themselves having to do a lot of software quality validation as they went through the migration process — setting ownerships and permissions — and they couldn’t risk mistakes, because unhindered access to documents is an essential part of the company’s daily manufacturing process. 

“With confidential documents around our intellectual property and processes, content is key to our company,” Grady says, “so security — knowing who has access, and when they can access it — is really important. Box has an ecosystem that allows us to effectively manage the distribution of unstructured content.”

The ability to govern unstructured content has another ramification: IDEXX often shares content with external partners when collaborating on life sciences projects or marketing initiatives. Some of that content includes sensitive data such as confidential company information and customer information, so security is absolutely imperative. 

Box Consulting helped with custom development in this domain. Grady says, “We have a great support partnership and strategic partnership with the Box team. We put them through the paces, and they didn’t give up on us through the challenges.”

The path forward with the Content Cloud

IDEXX now has 6K licenses, and when asked what top three benefits Box imbues, Grady reports:

1. Ease of use (“We get really great feedback on its usability”)
2. Workflow management
3. Visibility into who’s accessing what content

​​​​​​​This is not the end of the story for Box and IDEXX. Grady says, “Seeing the enhanced integration with Microsoft — and now native e-signature capabilities — I see that there are future opportunities for us to get more value out of the Box investment.”

Box understood where they could help us accelerate and what was really of value. It truly is a partnership — not just another vendor relationship.