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Data Midwives: Bringing Legacy Records Safely into the New World
Migrating charts is like delivering a history handle gently, or you lose the story.
Legacy data is messy and dear. It contains the old scar notes, the one nurse’s shorthand that matters, and the allergy a parent insisted on recording in the margins. Migrating that history is like midwifing a past into a new life: you must preserve the meaning, not only the bytes.
At a midwestern health system, a rushed migration stripped narrative fields down to CSVs. Post go live, clinicians lamented that lost context notes that had contained instructions about at-home caregiving were gone. Recovery cost weeks of reconciliation and immeasurable trust. We learned: data migration is not a back-end task; it is clinical stewardship.
Migration practices that honor stories
- Classify data by clinical value. Not all fields travel equally. Identify what must move verbatim (allergies, advanced directives) versus what can be summarized.
- Create a living archive. Keep an accessible snapshot of legacy views for a defined period and teach clinicians how to read them.
- Involve clinicians in mapping. Clinician review prevents translating nuance into noise.
- Automate quality checks, then spot-check with humans. Run reconciliation reports and have domain experts validate samples.
Migration checklist
- Inventory data sources and annotate clinical value.
- Run a dry-run migration and present clinicians with before/after stories.
- Build a reconciliation forum where clinicians can request targeted legacy recoveries.
- Preserve free text narratives as read-only archives for a defined phase post-go-live.
Data midwifery is about respect. When you carry a history forward with care, clinicians keep the thread of a life intact, and that continuity is medicine
Go Back
Data Midwives: Bringing Legacy Records Safely into the New World
Migrating charts is like delivering a history handle gently, or you lose the story.
Legacy data is messy and dear. It contains the old scar notes, the one nurse’s shorthand that matters, and the allergy a parent insisted on recording in the margins. Migrating that history is like midwifing a past into a new life: you must preserve the meaning, not only the bytes.
At a midwestern health system, a rushed migration stripped narrative fields down to CSVs. Post go live, clinicians lamented that lost context notes that had contained instructions about at-home caregiving were gone. Recovery cost weeks of reconciliation and immeasurable trust. We learned: data migration is not a back-end task; it is clinical stewardship.
Migration practices that honor stories
- Classify data by clinical value. Not all fields travel equally. Identify what must move verbatim (allergies, advanced directives) versus what can be summarized.
- Create a living archive. Keep an accessible snapshot of legacy views for a defined period and teach clinicians how to read them.
- Involve clinicians in mapping. Clinician review prevents translating nuance into noise.
- Automate quality checks, then spot-check with humans. Run reconciliation reports and have domain experts validate samples.
Migration checklist
- Inventory data sources and annotate clinical value.
- Run a dry-run migration and present clinicians with before/after stories.
- Build a reconciliation forum where clinicians can request targeted legacy recoveries.
- Preserve free text narratives as read-only archives for a defined phase post-go-live.
Data midwifery is about respect. When you carry a history forward with care, clinicians keep the thread of a life intact, and that continuity is medicine
Go Back
Data Midwives: Bringing Legacy Records Safely into the New World
Migrating charts is like delivering a history handle gently, or you lose the story.
Legacy data is messy and dear. It contains the old scar notes, the one nurse’s shorthand that matters, and the allergy a parent insisted on recording in the margins. Migrating that history is like midwifing a past into a new life: you must preserve the meaning, not only the bytes.
At a midwestern health system, a rushed migration stripped narrative fields down to CSVs. Post go live, clinicians lamented that lost context notes that had contained instructions about at-home caregiving were gone. Recovery cost weeks of reconciliation and immeasurable trust. We learned: data migration is not a back-end task; it is clinical stewardship.
Migration practices that honor stories
- Classify data by clinical value. Not all fields travel equally. Identify what must move verbatim (allergies, advanced directives) versus what can be summarized.
- Create a living archive. Keep an accessible snapshot of legacy views for a defined period and teach clinicians how to read them.
- Involve clinicians in mapping. Clinician review prevents translating nuance into noise.
- Automate quality checks, then spot-check with humans. Run reconciliation reports and have domain experts validate samples.
Migration checklist
- Inventory data sources and annotate clinical value.
- Run a dry-run migration and present clinicians with before/after stories.
- Build a reconciliation forum where clinicians can request targeted legacy recoveries.
- Preserve free text narratives as read-only archives for a defined phase post-go-live.
Data midwifery is about respect. When you carry a history forward with care, clinicians keep the thread of a life intact, and that continuity is medicine