A Clinical Research Nonprofit Replaces GoodSync’s Always Sync With Files.com Trial Routing

A nonprofit clinical research organization runs a clinical trials center whose independent imaging core labs read and analyze medical imagery on behalf of device and pharma trials.

Almost none of that imagery originates at the organization. Partner hospitals capture the exams, scrub the burned-in patient information through an anonymization service, and that service delivers the anonymized exams into the organization's network. The sending hospital chooses the service, so the organization 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 the organization's imaging business.

The organization 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 on a Discontinued Sync Tool and Manual Copies

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 the organization's imaging volume was climbing.

What the sync tool didn't cover, manual copies did. Exams outside its jobs were carried from the DMZ servers to the image repository by copies run manually, and the folders left behind after each transfer had to be cleaned up by hand. The cost landed on the reading physicians.

A physician expecting an exam sometimes had to ask IT where it was. The organization wanted the gap between the notification and the exam governed by a schedule, not by a manual 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: the labs' 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, the organization either requested a paid change or left that data unrouted and moved it by hand.

What the organization 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. The organization selected Files.com to be that layer.

A Staging Pipeline That Archives Everything and Routes by Trial

The organization 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 the organization 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 the organization's own configuration, built per trial on Files.com rather than purchased from the imaging vendor.

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 tens of thousands of backlogged files, and each cutover was validated in test folders with real exam data before the old path was disabled. Once the pattern held, the organization's imaging systems administrator templated it and now replicates it himself for each new study.

Several Studies, One Routing Template

With the Files.com pipeline in production, the organization replaced a discontinued sync tool and hand-run copies with a routing layer it configures itself.

• Exam-to-reader latency is now governed by schedule: frequent syncs and hot-folder copies bring the physician's notification and the exam closer together, instead of leaving the exam waiting on the next manual copy.
• Several 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.
• The organization's own team now diagnoses and re-points workflows without vendor involvement.

The immediate result was that exam movement stopped depending on a discontinued sync tool and manual copies. 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 the Organization

Just as telling is how the organization got there. A clinical imaging pipeline feeding active trials was never taken down for a cutover. Files.com let the organization 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.