CMMS Database Migration in Clinical Engineering: Penn Medicine's Experience

Database migration involves the transferring of data from one system to another system and typically is associated with information systems, database administration, relational databases, analytics, and business intelligence. Database migration requires careful planning and poses many challenges related to data assessment and cleansing, migration, testing, and managing risks throughout the project. This article describes the database migration activities associated with Penn Medicine's initiative to insource the clinical engineering department at Princeton Health into the health system's corporate information services department. Achieving established milestones throughout the project was pivotal to its successful execution. Defining key goals and making business decisions that would positively affect and support the migration also was imperative. Moreover, the experience described here highlights multiple stages of a computerized maintenance management system (CMMS) database migration project, conveys the importance of building internal and external relationships, and addresses additional ways to improve on future migration projects.