Move your clinic to new software in six weeks, with every record intact and every patient booked

Decide what moves, what stays and who owns it

Inventory what the old system holds, from demographics, notes, letters, results and prescriptions to consent forms, appointments, invoices, payments, memberships, message history and the audit log. Mark each one move, keep read-only, or archive.

Name one owner for the whole switch and one for each phase. Pick a go-live date at least six weeks out, on a low-volume day, away from the end of a billing month and from any clinician's leave.

Export everything, and prove the export works

Ask the old supplier in writing for a full export, its format and the delivery date. In the US, certified record systems must let a user create an export of all of a single patient's electronic health information, without developer help, and support an export of all the electronic health information for the whole patient population.¹ The files must be electronic and in a computable format, and a PDF counts only if it is machine-readable.¹

Pick twenty patients with long histories, including children, a deceased patient and someone with a complex medication list, and check each one field by field in the new system. Keep the raw export files as well as the imported version as the clinic's evidence of what the old record said. For scribe notes, follow switching an AI scribe without losing records.

Retention rules outlive the old contract

Confirm your own retention periods before you cancel anything. In the US, HIPAA requires required policies and documentation to be kept for 6 years from creation or from when they were last in effect, whichever is later.³ The AMA's Code of Medical Ethics adds that physicians should keep what a new physician would reasonably need, keep immunization records indefinitely, and tell patients how to reach stored records and for how long they will be available.²

In the UK, the ICO's storage limitation principle says personal data must not be kept longer than needed, that the clinic must be able to justify how long it keeps it, and that it needs a policy with standard retention periods.⁴ Write or update that policy now, and record where the archived export is held and who can open it.

Run both systems in parallel

For two to four weeks, book new appointments in the new system and keep the old one open read-only for history. Move future appointments in one batch, then check every one against the old diary. Any clinician should be able to find a past letter in under a minute.

Reconcile money daily. Compare deposits, open invoices and memberships in both systems each evening until totals agree for a full week.

Train the team and tell the patients

Train each role on its own day with real patients. The front desk learns the inbox, booking and payments, and clinicians learn notes, letters and signing.

Tell patients two weeks before go-live and again on the day, with the new booking link, any new way to pay and confirmation that their record has moved with them. Switch reminders on for every booking from the first day. In a BMJ Open meta-analysis of 21 randomised studies, patients sent reminders were 23% more likely to attend and no-shows fell from 21% to 15%.⁵

Go live, then keep the old system read-only

On go-live day, stop new entries in the old system, take a final export and file it with the first. Hold a fifteen minute review at the end of each of the first five days and log every issue with an owner.

On wai, every message, draft, approval and signature is written to an event log the clinic can export, and signed notes and letters can be exported into other systems, so the clinic can always read its own history.⁷⁶

wai hosts each clinic's records in its own country, under that country's rules. We set this up with your clinic. Booking reads each clinician's busy times from Google Calendar, Outlook or Apple Calendar so patients are only offered open times, and it never writes into a clinician's own calendar.

Where to start

This week, request the full export and its format from the current supplier in writing, and write down the retention periods that apply to your clinic. Then set the go-live date, name the owners and book the twenty-patient test. The implementation plan covers what comes after go-live, and wai prices are published on the pricing page.

Frequently asked questions