Inventory the information you have
List your current patient identifiers, contact details, consultation history, prescriptions, reports and financial records. Note which information can be exported and in what format.
Keep these categories distinct. A patient CSV does not necessarily contain consultation notes or attached reports. Ask for an explicit mapping between the old system and the proposed destination.
Agree how patients will be matched
Decide which identifier is authoritative and how duplicates will be checked. Do not assume that a name or phone number uniquely identifies a patient.
Test the mapping with synthetic or appropriately authorised samples. Have the relevant staff verify the result, including dates, document links and the connection between a visit and its patient.
Separate configuration from migration
Set up departments, roles, wards, beds, branding and invoice configuration as their own workstream. Those settings determine how the team will operate after the move.
Confirm the scope of each import. Care has specific import workflows, such as the medicine catalogue; migration of an entire legacy clinical system needs its own assessment rather than a promise of one-click conversion.
Rehearse the first day
Walk through arrivals, consultation, pharmacy and billing with the staff who will use them. Include file viewing, password reset and a record-recovery scenario.
Agree a support contact, escalation route and fallback process before the first live session. Make the change during a controlled period with a clearly defined scope.
Keep an acceptance record
Record which workflows have passed, which mappings were checked and which requirements remain open. Retain the agreed data-handling and retention decisions.
Only move to patient-data use when the organisation has accepted the clinical, operational, privacy and hosting setup. Expand the scope after the first phase has been checked in practice.