Understanding Healthcare Data Migration: Strategy & Best Practices

We mentioned that healthcare data migration doesn’t need to be such a daunting process. Now, we’ll tell you how to break the process down into more manageable steps. 

1. Assessment

The first step in any data migration strategy is understanding what data you have and where it currently resides. This means taking an inventory of all the systems that hold patient data, both electronic and paper-based. Once you have a comprehensive understanding of your current data landscape, and what data you are legally obligated to migrate or archive, you can begin to assess which data needs to be migrated and where it needs to go.

Once you know what data you need, you need to identify the right tools and partners to help you migrate that data. This might include finding a healthcare-specific data migration tool or partnering with a company like Two Point that has extensive experience migrating healthcare data.

When you entrust your healthcare data migration needs to Two Point, we refer to this step as the user discovery process. During this step, one of our top priorities is working with legacy application users and your IT department to determine the scope of the data migration. We’ll review any image and document requirements together and determine the most appropriate solution.

2. Data Cleanup

Data cleanup is an important but often overlooked step in the healthcare data migration process. In order to ensure only clean, accurate data is migrated, it’s important to scrub your source data before beginning the migration process. This means identifying and correcting any errors, duplicates, or unnecessary data.

This step falls under the ETL (extract, transform, load) step of Two Point’s data migration process. Before we upload your information to the new system vendor, we extract it from your existing database and clean and transform it with our ETL process. 

3. Data Conversion

Data conversion is the process of converting your data from its current format to the format required by your new system specs. This step is often completed by a third-party vendor with expertise in data conversion. 

This conversion step falls under Two Point’s Vendor Output Creation step of the data migration process. We work with your new vendor to ensure necessary data is converted to the format meeting their inbound specs provided to Two Point.

4. Data Testing

Data testing is essential to ensure your data has been converted accurately and that it can be successfully imported into your new system. Part of this step involves validating the data. This is a key element to data migration because it ensures there aren’t patient records errors.

5. Go-Live and Support

The go-live stage is when your new system goes live and starts handling patient data. This is usually preceded by a period of training for staff members who will be using the new system. 

Once the new system is up and running, all live data will be migrated over. It’s important to plan out your go-live stage in order to ensure a smooth transition for your patients and staff.

During this step with Two Point, we work with your team and your new vendor to schedule the go-live with as little downtime as possible.