By moving contracting, tax, credentialing and finance workflows onto Box, PDS Health gave teams direct control over their content, reduced dependence on IT, strengthened security and auditability, and established the foundation for future AI-powered workflows.
Healthcare organizations sit on enormous amounts of sensitive content — contracts, tax documents, clinical records, vendor agreements — and for years the industry security standard was to lock it all down. Put it on a network drive. Route everything through IT. Make the VPN the front door. This approach kept data safe, technically, but it also kept teams waiting. As healthcare organizations race to scale, this old security paradigm is a major bottleneck.
PDS Health, a leading integrated healthcare support organization, has over 18,000 team members and 1,200 dental and medical practices, and is adding about 100 new offices a year. With that kind of scale, the legacy content model was holding the company back from advancing its integrated approach to dental and medical care.
At Box’s Content + AI Summit, Nemi George, Vice President, IT & CISO at PDS Health, shared how the company moved from a rigid, IT-controlled content environment to one where individual teams can manage their own workflows, and how these foundational changes are setting the company up for what AI can make possible.
Key takeaways:
- PDS Health replaced an IT-gated network drive model with a secure self-service content environment in Box, giving teams more direct control over critical workflows
- Box helped streamline high-volume processes across tax, credentialing, finance, and legal, reducing manual handoffs, saving time, and improving auditability
- PDS Health created a stronger operational foundation for future AI use cases by centralizing content, governance, and integrations in Box
IT as gatekeeper is an antiquated ethos
"Before Box, folder structure was traditional,” says George, “Document retention was difficult to implement. The burden was on IT."
The approach created bottlenecks. Teams that needed to move quickly — the tax department coordinating with outside accountants, the legal team managing contracts, the accounting team running automations — were dependent on IT to make even routine changes.
PDS Health wanted a different model, one where the people closest to the work could manage their own content environment. Box provided a secure content layer to support provider credentialing, automation, legal workflow, and much more.
The move to Box helped liberate PDS Health’s data.
Access to content at scale
On Box, the shift was immediate. Rather than routing requests through IT, teams gained the ability to self-administer their own environments.
The tax department was an early example of what that looked like in practice. Every year, the tax team generates thousands of K-1 documents for team members, clients and partners. Distributing sensitive financial documents to that many recipients, securely and on time, is a compliance and logistics challenge that doesn't get easier as the network grows.
The team had been using a messy workflow with a lot of sensitive data flying around a traditional email ecosystem. Box replaced that entirely, moving the workflow from email to a complete set of steps inside Box.
The tax team then set up a workflow where tax documents automatically sync with a dedicated folder that outside accountants can access directly, an integration built with TaxCaddy.
No manual handoffs. No waiting on IT to provision access. The documents are there when accountants need them, and PDS Health was able to set up password protection to ensure that sensitive information reaches only intended recipients. Box provides the secure, auditable distribution channel that a process like this requires — reducing the risk that comes with unsecured sharing methods while keeping the experience straightforward for end users.
“It’s a nice fluid experience that’s saved a huge amount of time. And it’s always available,” reports David Baker, Chief Information and Digital Officer of PDS Health.
Faster provider credentialing
Before clinicians can see patients, they must be credentialed, a process that involves collecting licenses, certifications, and compliance documentation; verifying those documents; and storing them in a way that's auditable.
Box provides the structure and transparency that allows the credentialing team to track progress, reduce administrative burden, and accelerate provider onboarding.
PDS Health's credentialing team processes between 250 and 400 applications every month. Without a centralized system, that volume creates risk: documents get lost, processes stall, and new providers can't start working.
Now, the entire credentialing process, from application intake through document storage, is managed and stored in Box. Box provides the structure and transparency that allows the credentialing team to track progress, reduce administrative burden, and accelerate provider onboarding.
Stronger invoice processing
PDS Health's finance team manages more than 700,000 invoices annually from its offices across the country. Generating, sharing, and tracking that volume of financial documents manually is inefficient and often a source of errors and compliance exposure.
PDS Health's finance team built a custom application with Box serving as the content layer. The app automates invoice generation and the sharing of invoice links, ensuring that all teams have access to invoices from its practices across the network. Box drives efficiency, reduces errors, and supports compliance across what is, by any measure, a high-volume finance operation.
Time back, and a cleaner audit trail
The top-line outcome at PDS Health is straightforward: Teams got time back.
When people can manage their own content environments (setting up folders, controlling access, syncing documents with external partners), they stop waiting on IT for routine tasks.
Box enables PDS Health to support self-service at enterprise scale and removes bottlenecks in building critical workflows for teams. As a result, Box reduces the company’s IT dependence, helps save on administrative overhead, and lowers content security risk.
By using Box Shield, PDS Health has been able to secure 1.8 million shared links to date, and has secured multi-factor authentication for external collaborators.
Beyond security wins and time savings, Box’s centralized metadata and workflow capabilities mean that in the future, PDS Health can create a clean audit trail for approvals and exceptions, something that matters enormously in a regulated industry like healthcare. When a contract goes through an approval process inside Box, there could be a record of every step.
How PDS Health plans to capitalize on AI in the near future
PDS Health is not done building. The company has identified several areas where it plans to deepen its use of Box, and AI is the common thread running through all of them.
The company is now working with Box Consulting on a closed folder structure project — a foundational effort to organize and govern content across the enterprise in a way that will support future AI use cases. “If we don’t tackle these simple, tangible initiatives first,” quips George, “we’ll fall into the ocean and get nothing done.”
At the same time, they’re exploring Box Hubs and Box AI for multi-document querying, and are in active discussions about integrating Box as the content layer for ServiceNow workflows.
PDS Health’s overarching goal is to build a governed, enterprise-wide AI and automation strategy that reduces tool sprawl, lowers integration complexity, and standardizes how business needs and AI initiatives are delivered across the organization.
Through the alignment of the Enterprise Architecture Council (EAC), AI Center of Excellence (AI CoE), and Digital Technology Leads (DTL) teams, PDS Health is creating a scalable framework focused on operational efficiency, governance, and long-term architectural consistency rather than siloed point solutions.
Box fits into this vision by serving as the secure content, AI, and automation platform for the enterprise. By consolidating capabilities such as intelligent document processing, workflow automation, Box Sign, AI-driven insights, governance, and secure content management into a single platform, Box can help PDS Health accelerate high-impact use cases like contract intelligence, business associate agreement (BAA) tracking, and compliance reporting while supporting the organization’s broader future-state AI architecture.
Modernizing doesn’t mean choosing between control and flexibility
By now it’s a familiar story: a company expands rapidly, adds locations, adds staff, adds vendors. Document workflows that worked at 200 locations start to break at 600.
PDS Health’s experience demonstrates that these challenges can be addressed, not with a custom-built system that takes years to deploy, but with a content platform that teams can actually use. And security is not an afterthought. Box supports HIPAA requirements, provides audit trails, and gives security teams the visibility they need to manage a large, distributed content environment.
For healthcare organizations, where content touches everything from patient records to vendor contracts to compliance documentation, that combination of flexibility and security can help support operational efficiency while creating a strong foundation for future innovation.
