Can I get my patient data out of my current EHR?

Yes — you own your records, and essentially every EHR can export them. What varies is the price and the format. Many vendors charge per category: the structured database, scanned attachments, imaging, and clinical narratives can each carry a separate fee, and the total can reach five figures. Some categories can be exported free from within the software, but that is rarely volunteered.

What happens to my records when my EHR licence expires?

Most systems drop into a read-only mode so you can still view historical records. The trap is that some read-only modes show only the rendered narrative of a note, not the underlying data-entry view — so notes that were never finalised into narratives can become effectively unreadable. Confirm this while you still have full access.

How long does an EHR migration take?

The export itself is usually days to a couple of weeks depending on the vendor's queue. Importing, reviewing and reconciling typically takes one to two weeks. The longest part is usually waiting on the old vendor, which is why you request the export well before your renewal date rather than after.

How do I know the migration didn't lose anything?

Reconcile the counts by record type against what you know your practice has, before going live. Every technical check passes on an export that is simply missing a category — if the old system left clinical notes out of the file, the notes that are present are all perfectly valid and nothing in the import can tell. Only you know you have roughly 1,400 patients and not 900.

How to Switch EHR Without Losing Patient Data

The software is rarely what stops a clinic from switching. It's the ten years of patient records sitting inside the old system, and the entirely reasonable fear of losing them. Here's how a migration actually works, what the exports cost, the traps worth knowing before you give notice, and the one check that catches a bad export before it's too late.

1. Your data is exportable — but usually not free

You own your patient records. Every EHR can get them out. What varies enormously is the price and the shape of what you receive.

Many vendors charge per category. The structured database — patients, appointments, ledger — is typically one fee. Scanned attachments are another. Imaging is another. Clinical narratives, meaning the actual text of your notes, can be a third. Add them up and five figures is not unusual for a practice with a long history.

Before you pay for all of it, work out what you actually need. A functional medicine or hormone practice with no radiography does not need the imaging export. A cash-pay clinic may not need a decade of claim history. Ask for the price broken out by category rather than as a single number, and ask explicitly whether any categories can be exported free from within the software — some can, and it is almost never volunteered.

Also ask what format each export arrives in. CSV, tab-delimited text, and HTML narratives are all workable. A proprietary binary backup that only the old system can read is not an export, whatever it's called on the invoice.

2. The read-only trap

When a licence lapses, most systems drop into a read-only mode so you can still view historical records. Reassuring — and there's a detail inside it that is worth an hour of your time to check.

In some systems, read-only mode displays only the rendered narrative of a clinical note: the finished, formatted document. It does not give you the underlying data-entry view where the note was actually composed. If any of your notes were never finalised into narratives — drafts, templates half-filled, notes left in an intermediate state — they may become effectively unreadable the day your licence expires.

Find out whether this applies to you while you still have full access. It is the single most expensive thing to discover late, and no migration vendor can fix it after the fact. If it does apply, finalising those notes before expiry is tedious but entirely doable; doing it afterwards is not.

3. Export before the licence expires, not after

While your licence is active, vendor support is usually included in what you already pay. After expiry, help is often billed hourly, and software updates that the export process might require can cost extra on top.

Running the export a few months early, with support included and someone obliged to answer the phone, is materially cheaper and calmer than doing it under a read-only licence with a deadline. It also gives you time to look at what came out, notice something is missing, and go back — which is a conversation you can only have while you're still a customer.

4. What a complete migration carries

Patient demographics alone produce a practice full of empty charts and a lot of unhappy first appointments. A migration is only real when a patient signs in and their history is already there:

Patients — names, dates of birth, contact details, and their original join date, so a ten-year patient isn't shown as having joined this morning.
Chart or MRN numbers from the old system, kept on the record — they're how everything else gets filed, and how you look someone up when staff still remember the old number.
Clinical notes, with their original dates and authors intact.
Treatment plans with their real start dates — so a patient six weeks into a protocol resumes at week six, not week one.
Lab results, with collection dates, so trends survive the move.
Scanned documents — and the catalogue file that says which document belongs to which patient.
Appointment history and the financial ledger — outstanding balances especially.
Medication and allergy lists, which are the ones with real clinical risk if they don't come across.

That catalogue file matters more than it sounds. Attachments export as a folder of loose files with names like scan_00412.pdf. Without the index tying each filename to a patient record, you have a folder of PDFs and no way to file them — and re-filing a decade of scans by hand is not a project anyone finishes.

5. How records get matched to the right patient

This is where migrations go wrong quietly. Every note, lab, plan, and document has to land on the correct person, and the source data is always messier than anyone expects — married names, nicknames, two patients who share a name, a date of birth typed wrong in 2016.

A sound process matches on the chart or MRN number from the old system first, because that's the only truly unique key. It falls back to name plus date of birth. And when neither is conclusive, it refuses to guess.

Insist that unmatched records are reported rather than assigned. This is the single most important thing to get in writing. A note filed on the wrong patient is a clinical error nobody ever notices — it just sits there being wrong. An unmatched note is a visible task someone spends four minutes resolving. Any vendor whose migration reports zero unmatched records out of a decade of real-world data is not telling you something.

Ask to see the unmatched list before go-live. A handful out of thousands is normal and healthy. Zero is a claim worth interrogating.

6. Reconcile the totals before you go live

Here is the failure mode that no amount of technical validation catches. Every check passes on an export that is simply missing something. If the old system left clinical notes out of the file entirely, the notes that are present are all perfectly valid, correctly dated, and correctly matched. Nothing in the import can tell that a category never arrived.

Only you know that you have roughly 1,400 active patients and not 900. Only you know that you write about 60 notes a week. So before anything goes live, ask your new vendor for the counts by record type — patients, notes, plans, labs, documents, appointments — and check them against what you'd expect.

It takes ten minutes and it is the only check that catches an incomplete export while you can still do something about it. Do it before you cancel the old licence, not after.

7. Keeping the old system, briefly

Most vendors include a complimentary read-only period after expiry — often a year. Keep it as a safety net while you verify the migration and work through the first weeks on the new system.

Be more careful about paying for perpetual read-only access before you know you need it. It usually also means maintaining the old server, the old workstation it runs on, and whoever remembers the password. Verify the import first, live on the new system for a few months, and buy archival access only if something turns out to be genuinely missing and genuinely needed.

Separately: whatever you do, keep a copy of the raw export files themselves, encrypted, somewhere you control. They're your fallback regardless of what happens to either vendor. Note that they contain PHI, so they belong in encrypted storage, not a desktop folder or a personal cloud drive.

8. Telling patients

Sequence this after verification, not before. Patients should get their new login details once the migration is confirmed — so that the first time they sign in, their history, their plan, and their documents are already there.

A patient who logs into an empty chart concludes their records were lost, and that impression is very hard to undo with a follow-up email. Which is a good reason to do the import through a link the clinic controls, before any patient account is switched on, rather than opening the doors and fixing things as you go.

9. A realistic timeline

Now: ask your current vendor exactly what the export includes, what each category costs, what format it arrives in, and whether your notes are complete narratives.
Well before renewal: request and run the export while support is still included. Budget a couple of weeks for their queue.
1–2 weeks: import into the new system, review the unmatched list, reconcile the totals by record type.
Go live once the numbers check out — then notify patients with their new login details.
Keep the old system's complimentary read-only window and the raw export files as a safety net.

Aminova handles the import as part of onboarding. You upload the export through a secure, expiring link with a separate access code — no account is opened until the data is in and checked — and we bring across patients with their original join dates, chart numbers, notes, treatment plans at their real start week, labs, and scanned documents matched to the right chart. Anything that can't be placed with confidence is reported to you rather than guessed at, and you see the totals by record type before a single patient gets a login.

10. Frequently asked questions

Will I lose my notes if I switch EHR? Not if the export includes clinical narratives and you check that they arrived. The risk isn't the transfer — it's paying for an export that quietly omitted a category, which is why the count reconciliation matters.

Do I have to keep paying my old EHR forever? No. You need the data out, and a short read-only window while you verify. Perpetual archival access is a purchase to make only if you find something missing.

What if my old system won't give me an export? Under HIPAA you have a right to your patients' records, and in practice every vendor has an export process — the friction is commercial, not technical. Put the request in writing and escalate past first-line support.

Can I migrate mid-year without disrupting patients? Yes. The disruptive part is the go-live day, not the data. Verify first, switch on a quiet day, and send patient logins only once the charts are populated.

What about outstanding patient balances? Bring the ledger across, or at minimum the open balances. Starting a new system with every account at zero is a revenue decision nobody makes deliberately.