How Arthrex Manages Over 1.4 Million Assets to Drive Medical Innovation and Growth

TLDR; Arthrex manages its growing media archive with iconik. By adding metadata to their media, using metadata-powered search and recovery, and collaborating and sharing media in iconik, they have been able to scale and simplify their workflows while managing their assets more efficiently. The use of proxy editing workflows in iconik has also made it possible for editors to create new content faster from any location.

Meet Arthrex

Arthrex is a global leader in multispecialty, minimally invasive surgical technology, committed to helping surgeons treat their patients better through product development, medical research, quality manufacturing, and medical education.

Customer Highlights

• Arthrex is a pioneer in arthroscopy, a minimally invasive surgical procedure diagnosing and treating joint problems
• They develop over 1,000 innovative products and procedures every year
• Arthrex has 1.4 million assets
• 1,600 video projects created in 2022
• Opening a state of the art media production facility in 2023
• Arthrex has a team of 23+ people to support its media production

Arthrex offers a wide range of healthcare technology for various areas of the body. They also provide education to the global medical community through courses, symposiums, hands-on lab training, innovation forums, and patient education resources.

Video is essential to Arthrex's education and sales strategy. They use video for education with 4k surgical scope footage, instructional recordings of procedures, presentations, and patient resources like Orthopedia.com.

The company was an early mover to adopt its video-first strategy compared to most companies. Cisco forecasted that in 2022, 82% of all internet traffic would come from either video streaming or video downloads. And when you see stats like YouTube’s 500 hours of new video per second, the video-first trend becomes even more clear.

At Arthrex, video is an essential tool for sales and marketing as it can showcase products and provide an in-depth understanding of their products in action better than any other medium. By having video as a core part of its strategy, Arthrex clearly communicates the value of its products to establish its position as an industry leader.

Featured iconik User

Meet Zach Weicht, Senior Editor at Arthrex. With over 15 years of professional post-production experience and seven years as a senior editor, Zach has become an expert in managing large media archives and streamlining editorial workflows.

Why Arthrex Chose iconik Over Other MAMs

"We were faced with the challenge of managing 700 terabytes worth of data, and adding hundreds of terabytes of on-premise storage every year wasn't a cost-effective solution. Additionally, as a medical device company, Arthrex is FDA regulated, which means that we can't just delete data. We needed a system that would allow us to archive our data in a clean and easy manner, and be able to recover it if necessary. That's where iconik came in.” said Weicht.

With over 1.4 million assets, Arthrex needed a solution to manage its growing media archive. They turned to iconik because it can:

• Gather assets from any storage location
• Transfer files between hot and cold storage
• Offer super-charged search and recovery through detailed metadata.
• Speed up Post Production via the Adobe Premiere Pro panel

Assets from NAS and Cloud Storage In One Place

Arthrex was able to streamline its operations by creating a single library of assets in iconik. The hybrid cloud structure support in iconik allowed the production team to connect multiple on-premise NAS units and Arthrex’s Amazon S3 cloud storage to iconik.

This empowered people like Zach and the rest of the production team to find assets quickly with everything visible in a central place.

When content is easy to find, it’s also easy to share with collaborators for feedback. 

"Getting feedback on the front end allows us to be more efficient in the post-production process and make creative decisions without wasting time reaching out to people. With iconik, we can put ownership on those with the feedback to give us the information we need. Then, we can get to work quickly." said Weicht.

Archive and Restore Workflows

As a medical device company, Arthrex needs to be able to provide the FDA with data at a moment's notice, and iconik allows it to do that seamlessly. With archive and restore workflows in iconik, Arthrex is able to move assets from hot to cold storage. Even if assets are archived in cold storage, they are still available in iconik at any time for search and preview. 

The iconik Storage Gateway (ISG) lives on each NAS where it watches for new content, generates proxies locally, and pushes them to be indexed in the iconik cloud MAM.

Metadata: Auto-tagging Assets on Day One

Without metadata, searching through millions of assets is quite punishing. But with iconik, tags are automatically created upon ingest by iconik using folder names from Arthrex's original file structure. This makes it easier to discover and find assets in seconds. This gave their assets the context they needed to make them searchable.

Weicht adds, “Best practices for file naming and folder structures are extremely important, especially when you have a lot of that data. What I really appreciate about iconik is that it was able to preserve all of our metadata and standardize it right out of the box. The platform's ability to do folder tags and archive file names allowed us to find pretty much everything we needed without adding any other metadata.”

With iconik, Arthrex was able to preserve existing metadata, standardize metadata, and create custom metadata fields and views to make its data more relevant to the business.

Proxy Editing Workflows

Proxy-editing workflows allow editors to work with lighter files, which saves time and is more friendly to remote working. In this type of workflow, lower-resolution video copies are used during the editing process instead of original full-resolution videos. 

This workflow makes the editing experience smoother and faster since the computer doesn't have to process as much data. Arthrex uses proxy editing workflows via the iconik panel for Adobe Premiere Pro to quickly find assets, upload, and share projects in iconik. When it’s time to render, the iconik panel can reconnect the original, hi-res files for the final output.

Iconik will Scale to Support Arthrex's Plans for Investing in Production

In the future, Arthrex plans to invest more into its media production capabilities, with Studio X, a state-of-the-art facility opening this year. They also plan on hiring multiple post-production specialists to support an even higher volume of production.

As Arthrex continues to grow, it will rely on iconik to scale and support its needs.

Watch Our Webinar with Arthrex to Learn More

Iconik took part in the Henry Stewart “Video for Enterprise Road Show” where Arthrex was featured. Hosted by Neal Bilow, Zach Weicht of Arthrex, and Mike Szumlinski, Chief Product Officer at Backlight Creative. 

If you want to learn more and see a great demonstration of the iconik panel for Adobe, watch the webinar here.