How Tresorit drives a paperless office that prioritizes privacy

Sharing personal details safely and securely

Belgium’s National Institute for Health and Disability Insurance (NIHDI, known as RIZIV-INAMI-LIKIV in Belgium) supports millions of clients when they need it most.

Since 1963, the organization has administered the country’s disability benefits and national health insurance scheme. It also oversees Belgium’s compensation fund for medical accidents, with assessors often working through reams of documents to appraise hundreds of pending cases.

Tresorit’s encrypted collaboration tools support the NIHDI department overseeing the compensation fund for medical accidents to organize and share these sensitive documents safely and securely — including data-heavy files that need to remain accessible to a number of different internal and external parties.

Day-to-day, NIHDI’s internal case management system is tasked with managing the institution’s constant flow of information, says a spokesperson for the organization. It stores the medical files related to each case, as well as any documents and appraisals from experts, the plaintiff, or their healthcare provider. Each party will often have their own lawyer and medical advisor, all of whom must have access to these files at the same time.

Previously, NIHDI printed all of these documents on paper or transferred them onto CDs and DVDs before sending them to the concerned parties via recorded delivery. But when NIHDI decided to relocate its offices, they realized that their best solution amid the impending upheaval was to go completely paperless.

“We needed a secure solution to transfer very large files,” NIHDI’s spokesperson said. “These health files can be thousands of pages long and contain lots of pictures: for example, images of medical procedures that have allegedly gone wrong.”

The journey to paper-free

The organization needed a VDR-like solution, where relevant parties could not only access these large files but also add their own documents for everyone to see.

But due to the sensitivity of medical documents, that solution also had to reach the highest standards in digital security.

NIHDI needed its system to be GDPR-compliant as well as multilingual, providing support in German, French, and Dutch at the very least. The company’s data protection team was strict in its requirements for data to be stored in EU-based servers.

Any solution also needed to fall in line with medical regulations set out by Belgium’s federal Crossroads Bank for Social Security, the organization responsible for linking and digitizing more than 2,000 institutions in the country’s social security sector. That meant that no document duplicates could be held digitally.

After weighing up their options, NIHDI found one solution that catered best to their needs: Tresorit.

A seamless transition

NIHDI has now been using Tresorit for the past five years. It marked the company’s first foray into encrypted file sharing.

But Tresorit also stood out for its ease of use, easily slotting in with the organization’s existing operations.

“It was a ready-made solution that didn’t have to be developed internally, which takes more time, drop-feeding different versions until you get the perfect fit,” said NIHDI’s spokesperson.

NIHDI has since implemented Tresorit beyond its medical compensation department. Across the organization, it is used to share files externally with the pharmaceutical sector, hospitals, the police, and other governmental healthcare and social security groups, who can take full advantage of password protection, open limits, and expiry dates for documents.

“We have been promoting [Tresorit] internally, and to other organizations in the social security ecosystem,” says NIHDI’s spokesperson. “It’s the perfect match for our use, straight out of the box.”