- Regulatory requirement and obligation to patients for original data.
- Rotation errors causing erroneous EOD (End-of-Data) markers.
- IT vendor stumped or lacking resources.
- Proprietary expertise required.
- Time intensive recovery due to the nature of tape problems.
A large urban hospital in the US North East was generating approximately 90,000 medical images per day in their various clinics, requiring about 25GB of digital data storage. In order to control costs and improve efficiency, the hospital had implemented an automated, digital-tape library system for management and primary storage of the images. The system worked flawlessly serving both the clinical users as well as the related administrative staff until one day, several of the tapes appeared to be missing data or almost "empty" of data entirely. The problem was quickly traced to an inexperienced operator and did not re-occur. However the hospital had a regulatory and professional responsibility to provide integral patient care supported by the, now-lost, original images.
The tapes in question were sent to the vendor who tried repeatedly to read past the erroneous EOD markers and find the lost data. The technical support people who were well qualified to support the day-to-day issues driving customer support, did not have the right skill set and experience to solve the problem of lost data and were unable to solve the problem. Finally, a determined manager did some research and discovered a specialized industry segment known as "data recovery". Once she knew what to look for, she searched the web and quickly found ActionFront Data Recovery Labs. The specialists at ActionFront instantly recognized her problem, as their labs had successfully handled similar cases and had developed expertise to access these tapes when regular methods fail. ActionFront offered to review the media and quote the job under the no data - no charge policy. This made it an easy decision to send the problem tape cartridges to ActionFront.
The recoveries took many hours of lab time and the cost was accordingly high, however the value of the data was even higher. The hospital was delighted to regain access to the lost images and be able to provide the high standard of health care their staff and patients demanded.
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