During the weekend of 21-22 September 2019 Renalware 2.0 went live at Barts and The Royal London following around six months of active planning and preparation. Barts had been using the very first version of Renalware which ran on the commercial Filemaker™ database software and had first been installed around 2000. In contrast with the prior launch of Renalware 2.0 at King’s College hospital in March 2018 (from the MySQL/PHP version of Renalware), this was a more complex undertaking. Barts engaged undergraduates Nicholas Fan (Oxford University) and David Yin (King’s College, London) as two programmers to prepare the data migration. Using python, they created scripts to import the legacy Filemaker data sets (exported as CSV files) into Renalware’s PostgreSQL database. In the event, the migration went very smoothly and as many as 650,000 letters and 720,000 clinic visits were imported along with essential demographics, medications, and other data sets.

Along with Nicholas and David, Theo Barr and Cherry Lim coordinated the staff training sessions for around 450 Filemaker users performed over 2 weeks.

The success of the launch at Barts, which was prepared for in a relatively short period of time, is a model for how such complex database upgrades, including significant amounts of detailed legacy data, can be managed. The very short training and transition time is also a testament to Renalware’s highly intuitive interface.