Spinalogic Data Importer – Erorr Checking

Before importing to Spinalogic, it’s wise to clean obvious errors from your old system data. Use the Error Checking tab for this.

This may take a few sessions to complete. Just save your changes, close the importer and when you re-open, you can pick up from where you left off.

Once you have set your connections, click Next or click on the Error Checking tab. Your data will load from your old system and some initial processing of names and titles will complete. This may take a minute if you have a lot of patients with lots of cleaning up to do. It will be much faster second time around after you save these changes.

Click ‘Save’ now to save the changes made so far. This again will take a few minutes the first time around. Your changes are not saved to your old system (we never write to it – only read). They are saved locally and will be copied to Spinalogic when you get to the Data Import stage.

You can see the filter on bottom left is set to Active. You are seeing the patients that are marked as Active in your old system less the ones automatically being skipped (see below).

Skipping Patients

Some patients in your old system may have no first name or last name set. The importer automatically checks the ‘Skip’ box for those patients so they won’t be imported.

Go to the filter at bottom left and select ‘Skip’. Take a quick look for any that you don’t want to skip. If you find any, uncheck the ‘Skip’ box for that patient.

Active Patients

You will have enough work cleaning up your active patients without worrying about your inactive ones. Unfortunately, most systems are not very good at helping you to keep your patient Active status up to date. But we have an easy fix.

At the bottom center you can see ‘Mark patients not seen in 3 months as InActive’. If you click the ‘Mark’ button then the importer will set all patients who have not attended an appointment in your office in 3 months as InActive.

Click the ‘Mark’ button. You’ll see the count of Active patients change (probably to a much smaller number making your job here much easier).

Titles

Click on the column header ‘Title’ to sort by title. All the patients with a missing title are marked in yellow. This is not a critical error, but it’s probably worth fixing. Just go to each yellow box and put in the correct title – Mr, Mrs etc.

As you do, you’ll see them disappear as the table is still sorted by title and now they have one so they will move out of the yellow list.

Do this until all the yellow title boxes are gone. Scroll down and check the bottom of the list too.

Click save.

First Name

This is critical as you must have a first name recorded for your patient. (It’s required by most Boards.) You won’t have anyone in this list unless you ‘un-skipped’ them in the step above. Do a quick check anyway.

Click on the column header for First Name. Any blank entries will appear in red. Check at the top and the bottom of the list.

Click save.

KnownAs

This is the name that the patient is known by. It should not be blank either and the importer will fix most of them for you. Just sort by that column to check.

Click Save.

Last Name

Same as for First Name.

Click Save.

DOB – Date of Birth

Another critical column. Click the header. You may see some crazy dates here (like the year 212 or 2054!). Your Board most likely requres that you have a date of birth and your government probably requires that if you have one recorded that it is correct!

Fix these here in the importer. You may need to call some patients to check.

Make sure to scroll to the bottom of the list too for DOBs like in the year 2029! (or click the DOB header again to reverse the sort order).

Click Save.

Address

Same as for name, you need an address. Here you can only enter the first line of the patient’s address.

**IMPORTANT** Spinalogic groups patients by family and will use these addresses to match family members. Click on the column header to sort by address, then scan down and look for addresses that should be the same but are not. e.g. “12 Conway St” and “12 Conway Street” are not the same and will not be grouped together. They must be an exact match.

Also look for addresses that are the same but should not be.

This check is a little painful, but is important so you can have patients grouped correctly by family in Spinalogic from the start. Besides, your Board probably requires it and you only need do it for Active patients.

Click Save when done. Or save before you close down and come back another time.

Balance

Finally, the importer is calculating the account balance in each patients account in your old system. These are the initial balances that the patients will start with in Spinalogic. Transactions will not be imported, but balances will be so it’s critical these are correct.

Click on the column header to sort and do some random checks and see they match what you expect in your old system. If not, you may have some corrections you need to make in your old system. If they don’t seem to match up at all, send an email to support@spinalogic.org for help.

You can’t edit the balance directly in the importer. You’ll need to go to your old system to do that. Anytime you re-open the importer, these balances will be refreshed.

Click Save.

Duplicates

In the filter, select Duplicate Active. You’ll see a list of patients that may have been entered twice in your old system. The importer is showing patients with the same last and first name.

Sometimes different people just have the same name but more often you’ll find it’s the same person entered twice. Work out which is the right one and mark the one you don’t want as inactive. You may need to go to your old system to transfer data from one duplicate to the other to clean this up properly.

Click Save.

Next

The error checking may take a little time but the effort is worth it. You can import settings on the next tab before you have all the error checking done, but you are best not to import data until it’s done. Otherwise you’ll just import all the faulty data.

If you do, you’ll need to remove all patients and import again. This is OK so long as you don’t want to import x-rays or may notes in the patients file as these would be lost when you remove all patients. In other words, you’ll make your life easier if you just do things in order!

Having trouble?

Take a look at the Troubleshooting page.