Best Practice software is the clear leader in GP systems in Australia. Health IT looks after many surgeries running BP either traditionally on their premises or in our private cloud.
Unfortunately legacy vendors have not made it easy to convert data from other systems and this is where we can help. Our decades of expertise extends to a deep understanding of the underlying databases. From conversions to consulting to ongoing care of your systems, we assist you to improve patient care through better use of technology.
Health IT have successfully converted systems including Medical Director*, Pracsoft, Genie, RX, Stat Health and even home made systems. Our process ensures the integrity of your data and most importantly, minimises the stress and downtime associated with a conversion. If your data can be read, there should be a way to convert it.
* BP make a conversion utility for Medical Director and Medtech32. Ensure that you are not sold an expensive conversion from these products. These conversions are more straight forward and therefore less expensive than a bespoke one.
Data Conversion Process
Every conversion can be different. It’s important to discuss and plan your conversion before deciding to convert to Best Practice.
- Allow plenty of time. In our experience, practices convert between systems only about once per decade. This is not something to rush into. While a new financial year is often a great time to convert, ensure you plan well ahead of this and bear in mind that many other practices are wanting to convert then. In practice, the start of any month is a good “go live” date.
- Test it then test it again. Testing the conversion does a couple of things. It flags any problems so that we can take them into account when doing the final conversion. It shows us the timeframe required – for a big database the conversion may take several days. You will be required to sign off on the accuracy of the converted data so get a senior doctor to check the accuracy of the clinical data across complex and simple, new and old patients.
- Ensure you have a fallback plan. Adequate testing should ensure that you don’t need one, but you should not go ahead without knowing that you can fallback to the current state if you need to. Ensure you have a good backup and test restoration from it.
- Turn off connected stuff. We don’t want results or letters coming in, Medicare claims, or on-line appointments being made in the old system during the conversion as they will not exist in the new one. Have doctors clean out any data in their inbox well prior to conversion. Submit your final Medicare / DVA claim a couple of days prior so that you have time to receive and reconcile them.
