How to move patients over from other software

Before you ask for an export, settle two things:

• Who you are moving. Every patient, or only those who have been in over the last two years? Moving a database that goes back ten years means processing data you need a basis for and have to provide retention for.
• How deep. The record card and appointment history alone is different work from full clinical notes with attachments. Tell us what you really need on day one.

What we need above all: the patient data together with the consents, the appointment history with its statuses, the clinical notes and the attachments.

The format is not critical — we have worked from spreadsheet exports and from interchange files. Do not rework the file yourself and do not clean up date formats on your own initiative; it is easier for us to read the original than to guess what has been corrected.

The migration affects your go-live date, so we discuss it before the start, not after. When you get in touch, give us the name of the previous software and the approximate number of patients and appointments.

The first pass is a dry run only: we count the rows and check the consistency of the links, writing nothing. You get a report of what will move and what the export is missing. Only once you accept it do we start writing.

This is the moment to look at the numbers. If a thousand appointments are missing from the report, that means the export did not include them — not that they will be lost in Heltio.

In order: the clinic with its rooms and price list, the patients with their consents (privacy policy, marketing, data processing), the courses of therapy, the appointments with their statuses preserved, the clinical notes with their ICD-10, ICD-9 and ICF codes, and finally the attachments.

The run is resumable — an interrupted migration picks up where it stopped and does not duplicate what has already been moved.

After the migration, open the patient list and go through a dozen or so records: do the contact details match, does the appointment history carry the right dates and statuses, do the attachments open. A dozen records picked at random will catch a systematic error; one record will catch nothing.

There is no bulk invitation send. Spread it out and send the invitation during a visit, while the patient has their phone in hand — the invitation is valid for only 48 hours. Details: how to invite a patient to the portal.