Migrate in haste... repent at leisure

Top ten healthcare data migration tips from 21 years of experience

The quality of data migration is fundamental to the success of the National Programme for IT. How do you ensure that your project will be successful and cause minimal disruption to the trust’s day to day business of healthcare provision? Stalis offer the following tips:

1. Executive sponsorship of the data migration workstream is vital to reduce business risks and minimise delays to the trust’s CRS programme.
2. There is no such thing as 100% clean data in legacy systems, and gut feel is no substitute for properly assessed and quantified data quality issues.
3. Even with the best tools, data cleansing requires a high degree of manual intervention – never underestimate the task.
4. When integrating records from disparate systems the risk of attaching the wrong record to the wrong patient is significant – understand the impact of integrated records and plan to test for every eventuality.
5. Ensure that your testing programme reflects the full spectrum of trust activity across all specialties.
6. Data quality must never be compromised by the needs and pressures of expediency.
7. All new systems have teething problems – don’t make it worse by compressing the migration timescale when other things begin to slip.
8. An hour of planning is worth a week of firefighting – take the time needed to get a complete understanding of any new environment and the implications for existing workflows.
9. Don’t make assumptions at any level or take anything on face value – check and double check all eventualities that might impact the outcome.
10. There is no substitute for real experience.

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