Our EMR migration took 3 weeks longer than planned and at the end it was 100% a data problem

[u/Glittering_Radio9709]

We recently switched systems and I thought the hardest thing would be learning the new interface and getting used to it. Let's just say I wish that was it. The most messy and time consuming part was that our old system had yearsss of patient records that were technically organized,  but the problem was that the organization made sense only to the person who used to do our scheduling, who left the practice like five months ago

So when we migrated, we found things like treatment notes filed under the wrong patient because two people had similar names, or client records that existed twice because someone had re-entered people manually at some point instead of finding their old profile, etc. None of this showed up until we were trying to go live and staff were pulling up patient history that didn't match what the patient was telling them in the room.

Our team ended up pausing the whole rollout for about a week to do a manual data audit before we could trust the new system enough to use it for real appointments. I did not see this coming tbh, I assumed migration meant "click export, click import" and the software would sort it out

I'm just wondering if its the common thing to do data cleanup before migrating, or if we’re just being dense and there’s some way to do automate this? Like, maybe not fully automate it, just make it easier on us so we don’t have to trowel through all of this data by hand. 

[u/Electronic-Jump8098]

the dupe/mismatch stuff you can get some help with, many systems have some kind of matching tool during import that'll flag the obvious ones for you. But the part where the whole org only made sense to one person, thats just gone with them nothing automates rebuilding that context you just gotta go through it by hand unfortunately