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DIGITAL DISASTER: A CAUTIONARY TALE
When Dr. Larry Lipton walked into his dental office on a Monday morning in late June, he probably didn’t expect to be embarking on a frustrating journey through overlapping patient appointments, lost records and months of data rebuilding.

That’s exactly what happened, though, when he booted up the office computer holding his appointment scheduling, accounts receivable and patient records and heard an unusual noise.

"It’s a very unnerving experience to come in one morning and hear your hard drive grind to a halt," the Fairfield, Conn., pediatric dentist remembers.

That grinding was the sound of a "head crash," occurring when the hard drive’s read/write head falls into contact with the magnetic platters that store digital information, destroying that information. In Dr. Lipton’s case, the destruction was complete—there were no salvageable data on the disk.

However, he had a removable-media backup system as insurance against just this type of unexpected disaster. Recovering his records should have been as easy as restoring them from the last backup—except that when Dr. Lipton examined his backup disks, he found that the last successful backup had been in February 2002. While the backup appeared to be working properly and indicated a successful save each day, it hadn’t actually written any data for 18 months.

So he’s been left with the arduous and time-consuming task of rebuilding his files from whatever paper records he can find. It’s a process that will have repercussions through his practice for months to come.

"We’ve been rebuilding for the last two months," he said in August. "There are things I’ll never recoup or recover. I have people that owe me money that I’ll never see."

For a dentist like Dr. Lipton, who’s been in practice for 30 years, recovering from such a digital disaster has been an unpleasant, if not insurmountable, chore. However, he would like to help save as many of his colleagues as possible, particularly those just beginning their practices, from experiencing the same grief. "For a new dentist who is just starting to build a practice, this kind of loss could wipe him out," he says.

He has this emphatic piece of advice: "The message that I have to pass on to my colleagues is that you can never be too safe and sure when it comes to data integrity."

To avoid the agony of lost data from another head crash, Dr. Lipton has installed mirror-image hard drives and also a tape backup, which he monitors closely.

"It’s a prudent investment to have an IT [information technology] person come in once a month to ensure that your systems—particularly your backup system—are running correctly," he adds. "You absolutely, positively must ask the question: Is my backup working correctly?"

A workgroup of the ADA Standards Committee on Dental Informatics is developing a technical report to address the evolving issues of data integrity, redundancy, storage and accessibility. ADA members should look for an announcement on ADA.org when the draft report is ready for review and are invited to forward input in the meantime to Paul Bralower, manager of Standards Administration, at "bralowerp{at}ada.org".

Reported by Joe Hoyle, electronic media editor, "hoylej{at}ada.org".

This Article Full Text (PDF) Alert me when this article is cited Alert me if a correction is posted Services Similar articles in this journal Similar articles in PubMed Alert me to new issues of the journal Download to citation manager Citing Articles Citing Articles via Google Scholar Google Scholar Search for Related Content PubMed PubMed Citation