Three weeks of data and workflow preparation, one week of go-live training and hyper-care. Here's the week-by-week breakdown that we've used across 20+ go-lives.
Week 1: data and infrastructure
- Day 1-2 — Kick-off meeting with the hospital's project sponsor, IT lead and one nominated user per department.
- Day 3-4 — Data migration plan finalised: patient master, doctor master, drug formulary, charge master, opening pharmacy stock, opening receivables.
- Day 5-7 — Infrastructure setup: India-hosted database, hospital sub-domain, SSL, branch configuration, role definitions.
Week 2: workflow mapping
- Day 8-10 — Walk through OPD, IPD, pharmacy, lab and billing workflows with the nominated users. Document deviations from the default.
- Day 11-12 — Configure the hospital's specific charge codes, package rates, TPAs, surgery templates, prescription templates.
- Day 13-14 — Migrate the first batch of master data; users validate samples and flag mismatches.
Week 3: training the trainers
- Day 15-17 — Train 1-2 super-users per department. They become the in-hospital escalation point.
- Day 18-19 — Super-users run their first sessions for their teams, with the implementation lead observing and unblocking.
- Day 20-21 — Dress rehearsal: pick a half-day, run live patient flow on the new system in parallel with the old, catch the gaps.
Week 4: go-live and hyper-care
Go-live is on Day 22, ideally a Tuesday so the team has a clean weekend before and a full week to stabilise. Implementation team is on-site for the first 3 days, on Slack/WhatsApp continuously for week 4. By Day 30 the daily flow is on the new system, the old system is read-only, and the implementation team is on twice-weekly check-ins for the rest of the month.
Day 30 and beyond
The hard part is over but the work isn't. Week 5-8 is when feature-request lists are written, when the second wave of training happens (because the first wave's super-users have learned what they didn't know they didn't know), and when integrations to neighbouring systems — accounting software, label printers, lab machines — get done. Plan for it explicitly; don't let it ambush the team.
The mistakes that delay go-live
- Migrating too much historical data — five years of pharmacy invoices nobody will ever look at. Migrate the last 18 months, archive the rest.
- Letting the master data approval drift — the doctor who has to approve the charge master is in surgery for two weeks. Delegate it to a named alternative on Day 1.
- Skipping the dress rehearsal — the team will swear they don't need it. They do. Always.
- Going live on a Friday — the weekend is when issues hit and nobody is available to fix them. Tuesday or Wednesday only.
- Underestimating the parallel-run cost — running two systems in parallel for a week is exhausting. Plan for the burnout.