BACKGROUND:
Over ten years ago, Washington State developed a statewide immunization registry and has been very successful in promoting participation in the registry. At this time, the registry has over 3.5 million patients and over 14 million immunizations. In 2003, Washington decided to move from an internally developed application to a common off the shelf application. As a result, all of the existing data needed to be moved to the new system. In addition to the large amount of data, the two applications had significant differences in design and functionality.

OBJECTIVE:
This presentation will discuss the challenges of moving the data in a fully-populated immunization registry to a new application and the steps necessary to achieve a successful data migration. The presenters will outline the process used in migrating Washington’s data and discuss the decisions that were made during the process.

METHOD:
Planning, implementation, and analysis of actual migration.

RESULT:
The presentation will detail how each of the challenges of the Washington data migration was overcome. In addition, the presentation will discuss how data was validated, the business and process decisions that must be made during the migration process, roles in the migration, and how the decision was made that the migration was successful.

CONCLUSION:
Completing a data migration for a large immunization registry takes a carefully planned process and the participation of multiple parties from both the new application and the legacy application. In addition to the large quantity of data that must be moved, the differences in design and functionality add challenges that require the involvement of both technical and functional staff.

LEARNING OBJECTIVES:
Participants will learn the complexities of moving a large immunization registry to a new application. They will understand how each challenge can be overcome and how to determine the success of a large data migration.