Home Forums Discussions General Discussion converting medisoft demographics via x-link

I've put x-link for Medisoft on AC. When I called Medisoft to help me transport the demographics I was informed that my Medisoft version 12 is no longer supported. Therefore they can't help me unless I spend over $3600 to upgrade and then pay for support. Does anyone have any ideas for me?

Dr. Carrington,

Unfortunatly, getting up on the latest version of Medisoft is the best way to go. And for other reasons besides this one. When ICD 10 gets here you'll certainly need to upgrade Medisoft then. By getting current now, you'll ease the burden later as Medisoft, like other softwares, requires you to "catch up" every year you missed paying for support.

JamesNT

Is this for the one-time transfer/import of demographics, or is this for an ongoing active interface?

If it is a one-time activity, you could use go after the data with a variety of tools, otherwise James gives you the bottom-line.

I'd like to initially import the demographics. Because I'm close to retirement I don't know if I want to go to the Medisoft expense ($4100 including support) to be able to transfer back and forth between AC and Medisoft

The next question is when are you going to retire?

ICD-10 will be here in full force Oct. 2013.

Also, do keep in mind that if you are going to utilize both systems, you should look into the amount of labor involved in keying demographics into both systems. The amount of labor your staff expends maintaining both systems can wipe out $4100 pretty quick depending on the size of your practice, number of new patients you see regularly, etc.

If this truly is going to be a one time deal, then I would recommend finding someone who is really good with Microsoft Access to do the deed for you. Otherwise, the upgrade and implementation of X-link may be the way to go.

JamesNT

have you tried tech support for x link?
I have done this import a long time ago.....
so my steps may not be correct. So forgive me if it does not work...
I had to open x link program then start new process-import demographics from medisoft 12 to ac.
Then open AC and import from x link. I could only do 300 records at a time.
it took few (3-5)hours to import all charts.
Another problem you may face is all imports get a new chart number in AC.
So make sure before you proceed. I did it when I started using AC and therefore it was not a big problem for me.
Also be aware that not all fields are going to be imported.
Last word of caution make sure your medisoft chart number shows up on miss. field 1 of AC demographics or else billing info will not get forwarded from AC to Medisoft.

For the rest of fellow community board members feel free to correct me.

I'd appreciate any ideas for the one time transfer. Right now I'm not optimistic that EMR will work well with my pediatric practice but I want to give it a try. I've scaled down my practice in anticipation of retirement in 3 years so I don't get a lot of new patients. I'll continue with Medisoft billing separately

James, does that mean the export has to be manipulated in Access, or that is your recommendation? Does the export include multiple table, foreign-key relationships, or is it single row exports?

If it is a single row export in a .csv file format, then typically you can open the file in Excel or OpenOffice Calc and look at your starting point.

From this point to look at the import format on the other end, and determine if you want to do all the intermediate transformations of the data.

The easy ones are deleting or re-arranging columns to match the target format.

The more challenging are where you need to combine, or de-combine columns based on calculated fields.

If you enjoy futzing with spreadsheets, you might find the process of transforming data an interesting exercise. I have in the past, but I'm a recovering engineer.

I look forward to what James can bring to the conversation about details of the format.

Apologies for my taking so long to get back to this. We just moved to our new office on Friday and I've spent some time correcting any last many issues.

Based on reponses above, Dr. Carrington is interested in getting his demographics out of Medisoft and into Amazing Charts on a one time export/import. Before I get started, some things to consider:

1. Assuming Medisoft will not be sunsetted by Dr. Carrington, he will have the expense of maintaining demographics in each system separately since this is a one time export/import and not recurring.

2. Although the export/import is certainly possible, it will require a skilled IT person to perform the task. A person who has no or little skill with SQL Server, Access, the SQL language, or how data is stored in a database will simply not be able to perform this task.

3. Full backups of both MediSoft and Amazing Charts should be made first before any attempt to work with the data.

With all that being said, here is link to a website with steps I have used successfully in the past to export data out of MediSoft (I assume he is using an older version of MediSoft that relies on the Advantage Database Server, if he is on a newer version that uses SQL Server, he can just make an ODBC link to SQL Server easy enough).

http://tophatmonkey.com/MediExport/

Note: On the step shown where the tables are linked, I recommend IMPORTING them, not linking them. This will guarantee that you do not make any accidental changes to your live MediSoft data.

Once you have exported the data from the MWPAT table in MediSoft, you now have your patient data in a table in Access.

A quick check of AC does not reveal an import feature where you can import demos from a csv, Excel, or Access file that I can see, so we will have to do this through the backend.

Your IT person will now need to create an ODBC link in Access to your Amazing Charts database. Unfortunately, Amazing Charts does not give out the SQL Server SA password for the Amazing Charts instance of SQL Server it installs. The way to work around this is to install a second instance of SQL Server on the Amazing Charts Server. You can download a copy of SQL Server Express from http://www.microsoft.com/sql (also, don't forget the Management Studio Express).

Once the second copy of SQL Server is installed, you should have two instances of SQL Server when you look under the list of services on your computer:

SQL Server(Amazing Charts)
SQL Server (SQL Express)

Using the Services tool under Administrative Tools on your computer, stop the SQL Server(Amazing Charts) instance and start your instance SQL Server(SQL Express). Using the SQL Management Studio Express that you also downloaded and installed earlier, mount the Amazing Charts database in your instance of SQL Server.

In Access, Create an ODBC link to your instance of SQL Server and created a linked table to the Demographics Table in Amazing Charts. You can now import demographics data from the MWPAT table into the Demographics Table in Amazing Charts.

IMPORTANT: Your IT person should carefully review the datatypes used by Amazing Charts and MWPAT table. For example, if the MWPAT table has the birthdate as a text field in the format of 2011/30/01 and Amazing Charts uses a datatime datatype in the format of 01/30/2011, he will need to make that change. Also, beware of truncation where for example, the lastname field in the MWPAT table is length 50 but in AC it is length 20. Your IT person should carefully review each column and make any necessary changes/transformations to the data.

Once the import is done, shutdown and disable your instance of SQL Server (SQL Express) and restart SQL Server(Amazing Charts). You should now see your demographics in AC.

Be certain your instance of SQL Server is DISABLED. You cannot have to instances of SQL Server trying to access the same database files at the same time or you may corrupt the files.

As mentioned earlier, I have successfully used this procedure in the past. Your IT person may encounter a few snags along the way that may be unique to your setup, but nothing an experienced person can't overcome.

Again, be sure to make backups of both MediSoft and AC before beginning - even if the AC database is currently empty.

Lastly, be reminded that AC will not support your endeavor to do this.

Good luck in your import/export.

JamesNT

Addendum to my previous post:

While what I wrote should work, it may be overkill. I just saw on another post that AC has a tool called the Amazing Importer that I previously did not know about. If you do not wish to go spelunking through the Amazing Charts database (and I don't blame you), you can instead take the MWPAT table you have in your Access database and export it to an Excel spreadsheet and then use the Amazing Importer to pull it in. The Importer has intructions to follow.

You can see the thread that mentioned the importer here:
http://amazingcharts.com/ub/ubbthreads.php/topics/27579/Import_Patients#Post27579

JamesNT

I am swimming in tech water that is probably over my head here, but...
When we first started with AC, we imported demographics (the fields Dr. Carrington mentions) on about 16,000 patients from Medical Mastermind. The process was fairly easy, though we needed some help from AC support with a couple of quirks. This was done by exporting the data to a .csv format, and then into AC with the Amazing Importer. Mastermind is based on Access, and our version of AC at the time was version 4, also Access-based. I don't know if the process is as simple now.

Dr. Carrington,
If you are simply trying to see if Amazing Charts will work for your practice, why not just spend a few hours with some "dummy" patients, create some notes, and play with the program?

One other thought: we were very anxious to import all of our demographics from our old program, and ultimately were able to do so. On the other hand, it really does not take a lot of time for staff to enter the patients into the program from scratch. That may not make sense to you now, but keep in mind that you are probably going to re-enter insurance information anyway (it changes so fast and you want to avoid propagating errors). The names and addresses are relatively little typing, and lots of the phones/cells/and even addresses probably need updating, too.