Data migration is a daunting project, and in fact most practices abandon their data, or only carry forward parts of it.  We have been successful in small and large projects with nearly complete migrations.  The typical approach starts with understanding what access is available to the old system, and having knowledge of the new system.  The preferred approach by many vendors is creation of a temporary conversion interface system, where the conversion team will extract data from the old system, transform it, and upload to the new system via an approved interface (ie CCDA, HL7, or FHIR).  Success depends on several factors:

  1.  Access to the source (old system) database / server
  2. Knowing what can be imported into the new system, via programming interfaces, HL7, or direct database writes
  3. Expertise in parsing and converting the data to a suitable format for the new system

Several recent projects include:

  • Migration of 100,000 radiology reports for a small radiology practice using custom programming and direct database access
  • Migration of all clinical data (notes, vaccines, problems, medications, allergies, labs, radiology results) out of Allscripts Touchworks and into Epic for 200,000 patients
  • Migration of all clinical data out of Cerner Millenium and into Epic for 2 million patients