Certintell scales pharmacy onboarding by 9x with Box
Certintell, an Iowa-based telehealth service provider, is dedicated to improving the health of underserved patients. As part of its mission to make healthcare accessible and comprehensive, the company planned to onboard over 1,000 pharmacy partners nationwide within a year — a critical step toward expanding access for independent pharmacies serving local communities.
But this ambitious goal came with significant challenges: manual onboarding processes — including document generation, signatures, and reviews — slowed progress and taxed the resources of limited staff across multiple departments.
Before adopting Box, it took five team members to manually onboard new pharmacies. This challenge made onboarding goals seem daunting — and also diverted employees from time they could be spending doing more strategic work. Fred Merritt, PMO Director at Certintell, knew the team needed a solution that could scale operations without compromising quality or security. That solution was Intelligent Content Management from Box.
How Certintell benefits from Intelligent Content Management:
- Automates manual work to onboard 9x more pharmacies per month
- Reduces onboarding resources by 80%
- Builds a culture of trust and transparency among clients
Challenges: Resource bottlenecks slowing progress
Certintell faced two major hurdles in its pharmacy onboarding workflow: manual, time-intensive processes and inefficient back-and-forth communication. Managing forms and documents required extensive coordination between the legal team and other departments — creating bottlenecks that significantly slowed progress. Externally, pharmacies spent additional cycles asking questions and completing manual form submissions.
Slow, manual processes meant Certintell could only onboard six pharmacies per month — a pace far below its target of 1,000 within a year. The company decided to evaluate alternative solutions that would deliver the speed and scale they needed, without compromising on the rigorous security and compliance standards required to handle sensitive healthcare data.
Enterprise Advanced: a 9x improvement in scale
Certintell first discovered Box while searching for solutions to centralize and secure file storage in 2021. After hearing about Enterprise Advanced and Box’s new AI-powered workflow automation capabilities, the team enthusiastically registered for early beta access.
Certintell now uses Box Hubs as a central repository of information to keep cohorts of pharmacies at different stages of the onboarding process informed with the latest documentation and processes. A Box-powered onboarding workflow kicks off essential tasks — from auto-generating contracts using Box Forms and Doc Gen to sending signature requests and reminders through Box Sign. Finally, Box auto-creates folder structures to capture and organize documents, while Box AI identifies information gaps, such as incorrect naming conventions. Throughout this process, the team at Certintell can track the status of all pharmacies and cohorts all in one place, thanks to Box Apps.
“By automating our pharmacy onboarding workflow,” Merritt explained, “we’ve been able to reduce the number of people involved from five to just one resource managing the entire workflow. We went from onboarding six pharmacies a month to 56, a 9x improvement in scale.”
Box Consulting played an instrumental role during implementation, helping Certintell extract metadata (structured data inside unstructured content) from existing documents to ensure comprehensive reporting in custom dashboards via Box Apps.
Impact: Scaling responsibly while eliminating manual work
The results were transformative for Certintell’s pharmacy onboarding workflows. With Box, Certintell achieved the following outcomes:
- Pharmacy onboarding scaled 9x, from six pharmacy enrollments per month to 57 (with more growth to come)
- Project cycle times reduced by 20%, enabling faster onboarding without sacrificing accuracy or security
- Employees refocused on core responsibilities they were hired for instead of spending hours manually reviewing and managing hundreds of documents
Merritt emphasized how the company’s Intelligent Content Management-powered workflows cultivate trust among partners and clients: “Each pharmacy we work with has to be confident that we can handle protected health information in secure, HIPAA-compliant systems. With Box’s commitment to security and compliance, we’ve reinforced our culture of trust and transparency. The independent pharmacies we work with treat patients like family. As a result, we take security very seriously.”
Moving forward, the IT team at Certintell are looking forward to exploring deeper integrations between Box, particularly AI intelligence, and other technologies that enhance collaboration across internal teams to deliver solutions that keep pace with the team’s growth.
For information on how you can simplify, secure, and scale the work of growing your business, visit our small business resources page. Or, start a free trial with Box to unlock Intelligent Content Management, secure collaboration, and automated workflows.