ePractice to Cliniko migration for a 12-location physiotherapy group

The challenge

American Physiotherapy Group wanted to move from a legacy on-premises ePractice deployment to Cliniko across 12 locations. The platform had no API, only direct database access, and no usable technical documentation.

The risk was not just data volume. The team needed to migrate 800,000+ records across different record types, while preserving data integrity and clinical continuity. The source data also needed significant cleaning and transformation before it could fit Cliniko’s model.

They needed a migration that would be quiet on Monday morning: no missing patients, no broken histories, no manual triage queue for front-desk staff.

The solution

We started with reverse engineering the legacy schema. Our team profiled the on-premises database, reconstructed the effective data model, and mapped source entities into Cliniko’s structure.

From there, we built a staged migration pipeline with three key controls:

1. Deterministic transform rules for each record type, including normalization and field-level cleanup.
2. Validation checkpoints at each stage, so bad rows were quarantined instead of silently imported.
3. End-to-end reconciliation reporting to prove source and destination counts, links, and critical attributes matched.

We ran iterative dry runs with stakeholder sign-off, then executed production cutover over a single weekend.

The outcome

The group went live in Cliniko on schedule, with zero reported data loss. More than 800,000 records were migrated and validated, and all 12 locations resumed normal operations at the start of the week.

Because we cleaned and normalized data during migration, the client did not just move systems. They moved to a better baseline. Teams now work in a simpler platform with cleaner records and less operational drag.