Cardiovascular Research Foundation Replaces GoodSync’s Always Sync With Files.com Trial Routing

The Cardiovascular Research Foundation (CRF) is one of the world's leading nonprofit organizations in interventional cardiology research and education. It runs TCT, the field's defining annual symposium, and its Clinical Trials Center operates independent imaging core labs that read and analyze medical imagery on behalf of device and pharma trials. The angiographic core lab alone handles more than 20,000 cases a year, and the labs have performed analyses for hundreds of trials.

Almost none of that imagery originates at CRF. Partner hospitals capture the exams, scrub the burned-in patient information through an anonymization service, and that service delivers the anonymized exams into CRF's network. The sending hospital chooses the service, so CRF hosts a separate DMZ server for each one. Every exam then has to move inward, into the archive its analysts rely on and into the applications where physicians read. Moving files between systems it does not control is the front door of CRF's imaging business.

CRF used Files.com to rebuild that front door as routing it controls: reusable trial templates now send every exam to permanent archive and selected exams to analysis applications without a vendor change order or a script.

Exam Intake Ran on Abandoned Software and a Batch File in a Loop

That inward movement had outgrown its tooling. The internal transfer jobs ran on Always Sync, a product whose development stopped after GoodSync acquired it, just as CRF's imaging volume was climbing.

“We are transferring a lot more files than we did previously, and it seems to choke under the load.”

What the abandoned software didn't cover, people did. The Director of IT was personally running robocopy batch files in loops to carry exams from the DMZ servers to the image repository, and the folders left behind after each transfer had to be cleaned up by hand. The cost landed on the reading physicians.

“Once they come in, the doctors get a notification, and if they don't see it within a couple of hours, they think we lost it.”

A physician who assumed an exam was lost emailed IT, and IT went looking through batch-file output. The gap between the notification and the exam was governed by whoever remembered to run the copy.

Different Vendors, Different Folder Structures, and a Routing Change for Every Trial

Swapping in another sync tool would not have fixed it, because the problem was never just copying files. Each DMZ server belonged to a different anonymization vendor, so the folder structures differed for every source and nothing could be migrated as one uniform job. Exams had to stay intact inside their folders when they moved. The archive copy was permanent, kept in case a trial ever needed a re-analysis, while the copy that fed the analysis applications was transient: CRF's DICOM routing software consumed files out of hot folders as it picked them up, so a tool that naively mirrored source to destination would see an empty hot folder and flood it with duplicates. And the sources spanned two data centers, behind a DMZ that nobody wanted to open inbound firewall paths into.

There was a second cost hiding in the same workflow. Routing a trial's echo data directly into TomTec, the analysis application, had to be configured by the imaging vendor on a trial-by-trial basis. For each new trial, CRF either requested a paid change or left that data unrouted and moved it by hand.

What CRF needed was a routing layer of its own: one that could archive everything permanently, copy only selected study and modality combinations into the hot folders, never duplicate, clean up its own sources, and reach servers in a DMZ without any inbound connection. CRF selected Files.com to be that layer.

A Staging Pipeline That Archives Everything and Routes by Trial

CRF installed the Files.com Agent on its source servers across both data centers. Each Agent connected outbound only, so no inbound firewall rule into the DMZ was ever created.

Each source server synced into its own staging folder on Files.com, preserving that vendor's folder structure. From staging, Files.com sent everything to the NAS image repository for permanent archive. For the study and modality combinations CRF selected, Files.com Automations also copied the exams into the DICOM hot folders and flattened the folder structure so the routing software could pick them up. Delete-from-source and empty-folder removal retired the manual cleanup along with the copying.

The conditional hot-folder routing was CRF's own configuration, built per trial on Files.com rather than purchased from the imaging vendor.

“We're not going to pay that fee to make a simple change on our end, especially if we have to do this for different trials.”

The migration ran one source server at a time, because every vendor's structure was different. The first vendor server was the pilot, opening with a catch-up sync of 23,000 backlogged files, and each cutover was validated in test folders with real exam data before the old path was disabled. Once the pattern held, CRF's imaging systems administrator templated it and now replicates it himself for each new study.

Seven Studies, One Routing Template

With the Files.com pipeline in production, CRF replaced abandoned software and hand-run batch loops with a routing layer it configures itself.

• Exam-to-reader latency is now governed by schedule: hourly syncs and 15-minute hot-folder copies bring the physician's notification and the exam closer together, instead of leaving the exam hours behind a batch file.
• Seven concurrent imaging studies were syncing through Files.com across multiple hot-folder routing workflows. The old direct FTP-to-NAS path was switched off once the new one was validated.
• CRF's own team now diagnoses and re-points workflows without vendor involvement.

The immediate result was that exam movement stopped depending on abandoned software and one person's batch file. The compounding result is larger: every future trial now starts from a working pattern, so the cost of routing the next study is a template copy, not a change order or a script.

The Routing Layer Now Belongs to CRF

Just as telling is how CRF got there. A clinical imaging pipeline feeding active trials was never taken down for a cutover. Files.com let CRF replace it one vendor server at a time, each new path validated with real exam data before the old one was switched off, while the trials kept reading.