How we move your patient data across, safely and by people

Every physio I have spoken to about switching software asks the same question within about ninety seconds, and it is never about features. It is: what happens to my patients?

It is the right question. You are the data controller for those records. You have a legal duty to keep them for at least eight years after the last treatment, longer for children. If a migration goes wrong, that is not an inconvenience: it is a professional problem with your name on it.

So here is exactly how we do it, including the parts that are manual and the parts we will not promise.

We do not ask you to export and pray

The standard migration story in this industry is: your old provider gives you a CSV, you upload it somewhere, and you find out afterwards what survived. If notes came across as one unreadable block, or appointment history stopped at a date you did not notice, you find out weeks later when a patient asks about a treatment from 2023.

We do it the other way round. You share your records in whatever format you have them, and a person at our end does the import. Not a wizard you have to drive. Not a mapping screen where you match columns to fields and hope. A person.

That person is currently me. I will not pretend otherwise, and I will come back to why that matters.

The three steps, honestly

One: you send us what you have. A database export, a folder of PDFs, a spreadsheet somebody built in 2019, or all three. There is no format we require, because requiring a format just moves the hard work onto you. Files go into an encrypted store that only the import process can read, and they are deleted within 90 days of the import completing.

Two: we import and check. Your records are normalised into Movari's structure: patients, contact details, clinical history, documents, appointment history where it exists. The import is idempotent, which is a technical way of saying that if we have to run it twice because something was wrong, you do not end up with two of every patient. Every import writes to an audit trail against your account.

Three: you log in and it is there. Not a sample. Not a subset to check before we do the rest. Your practice, with its history, ready to work in.

What we will not claim

We do not claim that a human reads every clinical note in your archive. If you are bringing 800 patients with a decade of history, nobody is reading all of that, and any company that tells you otherwise is either lying or about to charge you a great deal of money.

What we do claim, and what is true, is this: the import is driven by a person who looks at the shape of your data before it lands, checks the result afterwards, and comes back to you when something does not look right: a date format that has parsed oddly, a field that turns out to hold two different things, notes that are missing for one particular year. Those are the failures that actually happen, and they are the ones a person catches and a wizard does not.

Why it is slower than it could be, on purpose

Sign-ups are cheap. Migrations are not. That asymmetry is the single biggest constraint on how fast Movari can grow, and we have decided to be honest about it rather than hide it behind an automated flow that occasionally destroys someone's records.

In practice this means you book your migration when you are ready, not the moment you sign up, and there may be a wait of a week or two. I would rather tell you that than pretend to infinite capacity.

What it costs

Nothing. There are no setup fees and no migration fees, and there is no tier of Movari where migration is included and another where it is not. It is £29 per practitioner per month, and this is part of it.

The reason is not generosity. It is that charging for migration would create exactly the wrong incentive: it would make the thing that determines whether you have a good first month into a line item that someone is tempted to skimp on.

Before you start

Three things worth doing regardless of who you move to:

Get your export out of your current provider early. Not because we need it early, but because that is the step most likely to be slow, and some providers are notably unhurried about it. You have a right to your data; ask for it in writing and give a deadline.

Keep your own copy of that export. Whatever happens with the migration, you remain the controller of those records and you should hold a copy independently of any supplier, including us.

Decide what you actually need moved. Sometimes the answer is everything. Often the honest answer is: active patients with full history, discharged patients with contact details and notes, and the 2014 appointment book can stay in the archive. Being clear about that up front makes the whole thing faster.

And afterwards

You keep the right to leave with everything, at any time, without asking us. You can export your full record (every patient, every note with its amendment history, every uploaded document) from inside the app whenever you want. We did not build a door that only opens inwards.