How many times in my consulting career have I heard the woes of vets and practice managers resulting from downed servers? When death is imminent, but everyone frantically prays that it’s only for the server. I wonder if there’s a special place in heaven for dusty servers who obliged their masters well (and probably other places for those we have all wanted to throttle)? 

The life of a server running a practice management software often ends in tragedy, only to be replaced with the next shiny model, just for the cycle to repeat. 

Some of you may have been privy to my joke that I’d like to host server-smashing parties. We’d all wear goggles and sling Herculean mallets, our jaw-dropped teenagers recording the whole thing to TikTok to the tune of Another One Bites the Dust. One party invitee even excitedly volunteered to bring a special torch that melts anything (maybe we don’t invite him). 

The party date is to be scheduled for all the servers that “bit the dust” during this pandemic. It’ll be a special postmortem celebration of survival in the face of inoperable practice management software (PIMS), all during the precarious times of COVID-caused-curbside check-in. The story of such practices rising from the ashes is the stuff of lore, and it is now in the history books. I write this tale because I survived what some are calling “The Greatest PIMS Conversions…Ever.” Survived and standing tall with my trusty mallet at the ready for the next server-dependent practice in need.

When a server-based PIMS can’t operate properly, or at all, the practice is at the mercy of the paper gods, succumbing to the obvious points of failure. Scheduling goes rogue, medical notes become paper airplanes, labs don’t get requisitioned or even sent (what’s that smell?), payment reconciliation is out the window, and yellow sticky notes reproduce like bunnies. People literally forget their own names. And if you’re a multi-doctor practice, you might as well lock the doors and hide in the storage closet. 

To be clear, practices can certainly switch to rhapsody in less than five minutes. And, with our built-in procedure, laboratory, and drug catalogs they can even be running from the get-go. 

But what happens when the breadth of a particular PIMS migration is way more than a “Hey, let’s just get a rhapsody account and start using the platform”? The To Do list is hefty.