Fort Knox: How We Lost Our Research Data Twice and Built a System That Makes It Impossible to Lose Again
· 14 min read
Healthcare outcomes research lives and dies on precision. Cohort definitions that took hours to build — selecting patients with Type 2 Diabetes on metformin for 90+ days while excluding those with renal failure — represent months of clinical reasoning. Concept sets encoding specific drug ingredients, condition hierarchies, and procedure codes are the molecular vocabulary of a study. When those disappear, you don't just lose files. You lose the intellectual work of defining who your study is about.
On March 13–14, 2026, we lost all of it. Then, in an unrelated incident the next morning, we nearly lost everything again.