Data migration best practices in healthcare are the playbook for moving PHI when you upgrade an EHR, go to the cloud, or consolidate after a merger. The URL is generic (“data migration”) because that is the query; the work is still clinical: one wrong allergy row or a broken DICOM tag is a patient-safety event, not a failed IT ticket.
If you meant whether the data are any good before you move them → data quality in healthcare. If you meant who owns the rules → data governance in healthcare. If you meant HIPAA transport of the copy → HIPAA-compliant data transfer.
This page is a 10-point playbook. PYCAD is not a migration vendor and does not run your cutover.
The 10-point playbook
| # | Practice | Why it matters on PHI |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Pre-migration assessment | Inventory sources, DICOM archives, interfaces, and who uses them. Unmapped feeds are how labs vanish on Monday. |
| 2 | Quality validation and cleansing | Duplicates, broken MRNs, empty allergies. Moving dirt is how the new EHR starts untrusted. See the quality page. |
| 3 | Phased cutover | Waves (department, facility, or data class). A big-bang EHR weekend is how you meet the incident commander. |
| 4 | Automated testing | Row counts, checksums, coded-value spot checks, image open tests. Manual sampling does not cover a PACS. |
| 5 | Rollback | Named RTO/RPO, a tested restore, and a trigger that is not “we will know.” Keep read-only legacy for a defined window. |
| 6 | Mapping documentation | Field-level maps, including ICD / SNOMED / DICOM tag transforms, versioned like code. Auditors will ask. |
| 7 | Parallel run | Same encounters through old and new; reconcile before you pull the plug. Highest confidence, highest cost — use it on the clinical core. |
| 8 | Change management | Clinician champions, role-based training, a place to report “this chart is wrong.” Adoption is the migration. |
| 9 | Performance baselines | Capture query and study-open times on the source; the new cloud is not faster because the slide said so. |
| 10 | Post-migration monitoring | Dashboards from hour one: error rates, interface backlogs, missing-image tickets. Go-live is the start of hypercare. |
Healthcare-specific pressure
Treat this as a clinical go-live, not a data-center move:
- MPI / identity — merge rules before load, or you mint duplicates the EMPI will spend a year chasing.
- Legal medical record — retention, legal hold, and a plan for the legacy chart that still has to be produced in court.
- Imaging — DICOM is not “files on a share.” Instance counts, transfer syntax, and a viewer test per modality belong in the test plan. PACS cutovers fail silently: the study is “there” and will not open.
- Interfaces — every HL7 feed is a dependency. Freeze, replay, or dual-publish; do not assume vendors will re-point on the day.
- BAA and encryption — contractors who touch the extract are business associates. The copy on the staging bucket is still PHI.
What not to do
Do not cleanse “later.” Do not skip a rollback drill. Do not let mapping live in one analyst’s spreadsheet. Do not call a vendor demo a rehearsal. And do not treat decommissioned disks as afterthoughts — retired arrays are a breach waiting for facilities to recycle them.
PYCAD implements imaging pipelines on top of DICOM / FHIR / PACS. It does not migrate your EHR or run your cutover. Case studies.