Always get your data migrated if you change your practice management system
Practices changing their software provider is quite common these days with all the choices of available providers and many practices moving to various cloud systems to free themselves of their in house servers.
It does however come as a surprise that occasionally a practice will opt to use a new system and not have their data copied across from their old system – probably one of the worst management decisions you can make!
It is not uncommon for a software provider to quote quite a high charge for a data migration because it is quite a lot of work, but having all the required business and patient information available in your new system will save you hundreds of thousands of dollars in future pain in inefficiencies, missed reminders, poor customer experience, loss of adequate long term prescription history and loss of your ability to track financial data.
Be wary of software providers that advise you not to migrate your data! The very fact that they have suggested this means that they just want to close a sale and probably do not have the in house capability to do the job – a red flag for their customer service. If they cant migrate your data, then select a different software company.
Also, to avoid the future pain, not only should you have a data migration, but you should spend a bit of time to make sure that it has been done correctly.
Here is a quick checklist of the things you should look at:
Check patient records:
- Search and select 20 patients in your old system. See if you can find the same patients in New System. This is a quick check that you can find the appropriate patients
- For these same patients look at their clinical notes. and make sure that the clinical notes are the same
- For these same patients look at their reminders and make sure that the reminders are the same. To see reminders on New System, click on a patient name and select the ‘reminders’ tab.
- For these same patients check all the signalment information on New System and make sure that the information is there in the format that you want it. Make sure that there are not additional pieces of information that you store on your old system that is missing on New System.
- For these same patients check patient weights and make sure that the weights in New System and your old system are the same
- For these patients, make sure that the date of birth in both systems is the same
- For these same patients check the history of the products sold in the last 12 months. The new system and old system should list all the same products with exactly the same prices and invoice totals – this will verify financial information is correct.
Check customer (pet owner) records:
- Search and select 20 clients in your old system. See if you can find the same clients in New System. This is a quick check that you can find the appropriate clients
- Check that all telephone numbers are present especially mobile numbers
- Check that the address information is correct and properly formatted to look nice.
- Check that email address is correct
Check invoicing and pricing:
- Select any patient in New System and generate an invoice for 20 commonly used products and services. Save this invoice.
- Do the same thing in your old system with the same 20 products.
- Compare the prices on each system and make sure that they are the same and that the GST is the same. We would advise you to test your most commonly invoiced services. This is usually your consultation fees, vaccination fees and surgical procedure fees such as anaesthetics.
- Print out this invoice in New System. Make sure that it is formatted appropriately for your purposes and looks acceptable to you.
- If your old system uses ‘builds of materials’ or ‘procedure templates’ that automatically generate complex invoices, test a few of these in the New System OR understand that it may be impossible to migrate these and be prepared to manually create new ones.
- If the New System automatically sets reminders based on the items that are invoiced, check these. For example, if you invoice a vaccination it sets a reminder in a years time. Check that this happens by invoicing your vaccination products. When you save the invoice, New System should alert you that reminders have been set.
- Make sure you know how to maintain inventory. Search for about 20 products in your old system and search for the corresponding 20 products in New System. Make sure that some of these are vaccinations
- For each of the products below, click on them and look at all the product information. Make sure that the information in New System is the same as your old system.
- For each of the vaccination products a make sure that you understand how it will automatically set reminders and how to set this up otherwise you will lose money in 365 days time if reminders to not get automatically set.
Check reminder lists:
- Check your most important reminder lists in New System and compare it to the list in your old system. Bear in mind that the data in New System may be a few weeks old, but the patients listed for each reminder type should be very similar, especially in historic months.
