Switching clinic software without losing your patient records

Export before you cancel anything

The single most expensive mistake in a migration is cancelling the old subscription before the export is safely on a disk you control. Access usually ends the day the plan does, and a vendor under no obligation to help you leave will not be quick about it.

Get out, at minimum:

• Patients, with their existing patient IDs or UHIDs
• Visit history, with dates, doctors and notes
• Prescriptions
• Invoices and payments, including invoice numbers
• Stock: medicines, batches and current quantities
• Lab orders and results
• Any uploaded documents and scans

Take it as CSV or JSON. A PDF export is a picture of your data, not your data, and nothing can import it.

What migrates cleanly, and what does not

Migrates cleanly: patient demographics, contact details, allergies, appointment history, invoice headers and totals, stock lists. These are flat, structured, and mean the same thing in every system.

Migrates awkwardly: consultation notes, because every system structures them differently. Free text survives; a rigid SOAP template rarely maps onto another rigid SOAP template. Accept that older notes may land as text rather than as fields, and do not spend a fortnight fixing that.

Does not migrate, and should not: invoice numbering sequences. Do not try to continue the old series in the new system. Start a new series with a new prefix on a clean financial-year boundary if you can. Two systems fighting over a "consecutive, no gaps" sequence is exactly the problem you do not want during a GST audit.

A migration plan that holds up

1. Export everything, twice. Once now, once on the last day. Check the file opens and the row counts look right.
2. Import patients first, in a trial run. Everything else hangs off the patient record. Get identifiers, phone numbers and duplicate handling right before importing anything else.
3. Pick a quiet cutover. The first working day after a holiday, or the start of a month. Never a Monday morning.
4. Run both for two weeks. New activity in the new system; the old one open, read-only, for looking things up. Resist entering anything twice.
5. Keep the old export forever. Storage is cheap and retention obligations are long. Keep the raw files even after the old vendor is gone.

Train the front desk, not the doctors

Doctors touch a handful of screens and adapt in a day. The front desk lives in the software for eight hours and knows every shortcut of the old one. They will feel the switch hardest, and their confidence is what patients experience as a smooth or chaotic changeover. Spend the training time there.

Ask before you sign, not after

• Can I export everything myself, today, without asking you?
• What format, and does it include invoice numbers and stock batches?
• If I cancel, how long do my records stay readable?
• Will you help me import from my current system, and at what cost?
• Is there a contract minimum?

A vendor confident in their product answers all five without hedging. The ease of leaving is the best available proxy for how they will treat you once you have stayed.

Clinikr exports every dataset as CSV from inside Settings, free, at any time — and if you stop paying, the records stay readable and the export keeps working. If you are moving from another system, send a sample export to hello@clinikr.xyz and we will map the columns with you.