I have run migrations off Cornerstone, AVImark, and ezyVet for years — the muscle memory is real. The Vetch migration playbook is built around the thing that actually makes them clean: discipline about parallel-running, not anything fancy on the technical side. Here is how it's designed to go.
Day 1–3 · discovery
We start by sitting with the owner, the associates, the front desk lead, and the head tech for a couple of hours. Not a sales call. We map the workflows. Where do recall lists live? What's the rule for charging a no-show fee? Who has signing authority on a Saturday?
Half the migration plan comes out of that meeting. The other half comes from running an export against the live Cornerstone database.
Week 1–2 · import
Patients, owners, visit history, AR, recall queues — all into a private Vetch tenant. We dedupe the duplicate owner records that pile up over the years (normal for any 15+ year practice). Original PDFs are preserved alongside the structured fields, so when a vet pulls a 2014 chart, they see exactly what was there before.
Week 3 · validate
Both systems run in parallel. The clinic keeps writing into Cornerstone as the source of truth; Vetch mirrors. Every morning, we run a diff. Most days it should be empty. When it isn't, it's usually something small — a duplicate weight log — caught and fixed before it matters.
The cutover · Friday evening
- Cornerstone goes read-only at 5:00pm.
- Final snapshot a minute later.
- Vetch takes over within minutes. Front desk closes the cash drawers in Vetch to confirm the payment flow.
- The first signed chart on the new system is a same-evening visit — care never pauses.
- By Monday morning, the team walks in to a fully-populated Vetch.
We don't pretend nothing is ever hard — recall logic for a practice's specific cadence can take a couple of iterations after cutover. But the bar is absolute: no day where the clinic can't see a patient because of the migration.
The old system stays read-only for six months after cutover — a safety net practices should almost never need to reach for.