The Data Migration standard is a mandatory standard that applies to all suppliers who are either already on the NHS assured supplier list – or – are those like CareDocs that are in the process of applying to be. 

To describe the overarching aim of the standard, the official NHS England Confluence page states: 

‘The Data Migration Standard supports the safe and effective migration of data between Catalogue Solutions when a Health or Care Organisation opts to change from one Catalogue Solution to another.’ 

So, what does this actually mean for your average care provider or business? 

In a nutshell, the main benefit from the introduction of the Data Migration standard is that care providers will be able to move between NHS assured software platforms more seamlessly than ever before. 

Prior to the enforcement of the Data Migration standard, to move to a new software provider or platform would often be cumbersome, time consuming, and include a large number of physical man hours from care staff to achieve, with the potential for a lot of data re-entry to ensure that care records where as accurate as they need to be. 

With the Data Migration standard in place, the aim is to ensure that NHS assured suppliers not only have data stored in an accessible and easily exportable format, but that they will also have a plan in place for migrating customer data to / from another NHS assured supplier software platform, resulting in a more streamlined and efficient process for the care business and staff involved.  

In order to achieve compliance with the Data Migration standard, suppliers are also expected to offer a data migration service to support the safe and effective transfer of all data that is required to replicate a service user’s record in the new software platform (to the level of detail it was recorded at at the time of the data migration happening). To evidence how they will do this, all prospective or existing NHS assured suppliers have to provide a Data Migration Approach to the NHS that provides details of how they would plan to act if they were either migrating data to or from their software. Therefore, care providers can rest assured that they will be supported if they decide to move to a new supplier. 

In an instance where one supplier involved in the migration is not on the NHS assured supplier list, they will not be able to be held to the Data Migration standard. 

Whilst our legacy CareDocs product does not have to meet the Data Migration standard as it is not an NHS assured software solution, new customers will be able to take full advantage of the benefits the standard provides if they choose to move over to our CareDocs software platform. 

Existing customers don’t have to worry though, as our team have been busy building a custom data migration process just for moving our data from our legacy system to our new software, meaning that onboarding from our legacy product to our new product will be far less stressful than moving to a new supplier!  

You can find out more from NHS England via the link below: 

https://nhse-dsic.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/DSCR/pages/12238651418/Data+Migration+DSCR