1 Nov 2022
In this latest VBJ Technology Insight feature, MWI Animal Health shares its success and expertise in the migration of more than 1,000 practice sites from a variety of systems across companion animal, farm, referral and equine practices.
MWI Animal Health
Job Title
The decision to move practice management system is a big consideration. You not only want to ensure the functionality is suitable for your business, but also that the provider can:
Our onboarding and operational teams have extensive experience of hardware installation and data migration (supporting more than 20-plus systems).
We’ve successfully migrated more than 1,000 practice sites from a variety of systems across companion animal, farm, referral and equine practices.
We operate and run the biggest veterinary estate across the UK today and have a proven track record of delivering to corporate and independent practices.
Each customer follows a standardised life cycle management approach for migration. The process follows a defined sequence of checkpoints and activities as illustrated here.
We use our country-wide distribution network which uses a dedicated climate-controlled transport fleet delivering wholesale veterinary goods to customer practice sites.
Our field engineers undertake a site survey with the customer, providing expertise and recommendations around the practice layout, hardware required and a plan to replace.
Our engineers work closely with the practice staff to identify and assign appropriate hardware to meet the operational and logistic requirements. This includes technical specification, location, and connecting to network and hardware devices.
Hardware is imaged and configured at our Stoke distribution hub. We use a centralised data management system for picking, imaging and configuration, and an industrial multi-device imaging setup to operate at scale.
The team provides a 24/7 service 365 days of the year, irrespective of location in the UK or Ireland. It ensures installations are performed with minimum interruption to the practice sites daily operation. After every install, the hardware has been configured, tested and setup for practice staff to use in the morning. We also work to retain legacy practice management hardware as part of legislative, financial or operational requirements.
As part of its commitment to support the European WEEE directive (Directive 2012/19/EU), MWI works with a registered IT hardware recycler to ensure all hardware is recycled in accordance with this directive. All recycling follows our quality process. This ensures we can track it from collection through to disposal, including the safe destruction of personally identifiable data and the legacy hardware.
Our data migration team is integral to the process, providing pre-migration data analysis, automated merge to live, data review and hyper care support post go-live.
Regardless of size, scale and location of the practice, every customer follows a standardised data migration service using integration services, scripts and pipelines developed for several legacy practice management systems.
We work with you and your current practice management system provider to establish a robust, reliable, and compliant method of data handling, with data security and GDPR compliance integral throughout. We can migrate non-practice management system-held data in a variety of formats. Any data that is to be migrated is handled and processed in an environment separate to the production practice management system. This ensures integrity and quality is built into the migration process to eliminate security issues, viruses and malware being migrated.
We also ensure any data changes are carefully analysed and processed prior to the production migration step. By adhering to this practice, exceptions and anomalies can be spotted early, and we can identify problems ahead of time. Once you are happy that the data is ready, we agree a time and date that meets with your operational needs for the production migration. After this, you can log in and verify data accuracy while becoming familiar with the Merlin practice management system.
It is imperative that your practice has the necessary support services in place to ensure the operational activities are not compromised during the migration process. This means defining when the practices’ staff stop working with the existing PMS so that a point-in-time copy of the source data can be taken for the migration. After this, the old system can be brought back online in a read-only capacity to enable the practice to access and refer to any historical information.
After migration, we are available to support, guide and resolve any issues that are affecting your business’ operation. Typically, our customers find that the provision of a hyper-care service – initially for a one to two-week period – supports them in their transition from their old PMS to Merlin. This service is provided as standard.
Following the period of hyper-care, our service desk team will take over to manage the ongoing process.
For more information on our Enterprise veterinary hardware and data migration services, email [email protected]
