How Supervision Assist built a set-and-forget, HIPAA-compliant file workflow

Industry

E-learning

Founded

2015

Headquarters

Denver, CO, USA

Website

supervisionassist.com

We’ve really been able to just set it and forget it. All of our development problems right now are in other areas.

Maximillian SchwanekampCTO

Executive summary

Supervision Assist is a B2B SaaS platform used by universities to manage mental health practicums and internship programs. The application handles sensitive student data, documents, and recorded counseling sessions, making secure file uploads a critical part of the product.

By integrating Uploadcare, Supervision Assist offloaded file uploads and storage into a HIPAA-compliant workflow. The team achieved 99.9% upload reliability and eliminated recurring, unplanned maintenance work caused by failed uploads—saving 50+ hours of developer time per year that had previously gone into manual investigation and recovery, and allowing engineers to focus on core product development.

The challenge: building a HIPAA-compliant file workflow without in-house maintenance

Supervision Assist supports mental health practicum programs and handles sensitive documents and recorded counseling sessions as part of its core workflow. Users regularly upload large files, including uncompressed video, which made reliability and data protection critical—especially in a HIPAA-regulated environment.

With a lean engineering team, Supervision Assist initially relied on internal tools to manage file uploads. As usage grew, that approach became harder to sustain. Failed or interrupted uploads required manual investigation, partial files had to be cleaned up, and long-running video uploads frequently failed. This work was reactive and unplanned, pulling developers away from both core product development and improvements to the upload experience itself.

We can build internal tools, but the maintenance burden is just not worth it. We end up spending more time working on things that are not our application.

Maximillian SchwanekampCTO

The solution

After deciding to move away from maintaining uploads in-house, Supervision Assist sought a platform that could reliably handle sensitive data in a regulated healthcare environment. Security and compliance were baseline requirements, but the team also needed a solution that could handle large files, recover gracefully from interruptions, and integrate without adding operational overhead.

Uploadcare provided an upload-to-delivery pipeline that fit cleanly into Supervision Assist’s existing application. By offloading the file workflow to a purpose-built platform, the team was able to improve reliability while removing the need to monitor, debug, or maintain upload infrastructure internally.

How Uploadcare helped

• Easy integration with minimal engineering effort: The team quickly added secure file uploads, guided by comprehensive documentation that enabled smooth integration without custom infrastructure or workflow changes.
• HIPAA-compliant handling of sensitive data: Sensitive documents and recorded counseling sessions were processed securely, with encrypted communication and controlled access throughout the file’s lifecycle.
• Fine-grained access control: Signed uploads and URLs allowed the team to control who could upload files and who could access them afterward, helping ensure sensitive content was only available to authorized users.
• Reliable uploads at any scale: Uploadcare supported uploads of any file type up to 5 TB, allowing large, uncompressed video files to be uploaded reliably without interruptions or manual fixes.

The results

With Uploadcare handling sensitive uploads, Supervision Assist reduced both operational risk and engineering overhead while improving reliability across the platform.

• 50+ hours of developer time saved annually: Before Uploadcare, roughly 1 in 20 uploads failed and required about 30 minutes of manual investigation and cleanup. Eliminating this recurring recovery work removed more than a week per year of unplanned engineering overhead.
• 99.9% upload reliability: Files are now uploaded with 99.9% reliability, allowing students and faculty to consistently upload and access required materials without errors.
• Confident handling of sensitive large files: Supervision Assist can dependably accept uncompressed video files averaging 1.5 GB, with support for files up to 5 TB, even when uploads span long sessions or unstable connections.