Exporting and Importing is an efficient and effective way to manage patient records in Noah, it is helpful for a variety of tasks:
- Moving and merging records from a laptop to a server database
- Consolidating databases from multiple offices
- Exporting a patient record to email to another office
- Keeping databases at separate locations up to date
Moving a Noah Database to new machine
Export and Import is not the recommended way to move a full Noah database from one machine to another. To move a full Noah database, use Backup and Restore from the Noah Console.
Merging Noah Data
If the goal of the Export and Import is to combine and merge records into an already existing database, export and import is highly effective.
Be aware of some cautions working with large databases:
1 Always import the nhax on the Noah Server machine.
2. Very large database exports can sometimes have issues importing where the import may time-out before completion, especially on older machines. For a database over 500MB proceed with caution, for a database over 1GB an export/import is not recommended, you may need to break the database into 2 or 3 exports. In Noah 4.13 and later a warning message will appear on export and imports greater than 5000 patients:
3. Another infrequent issue with large export/imports is a patient record in the database that is corrupt, and the corrupt record prevents the whole database from importing. Error can be ‘transport sink error’ or ‘invalid character’ or an ‘Integer error’.
- If you suspect a corrupt record you will need to export and import the database in smaller sections to locate the corrupt record. For example, export Last Names A-G to see if the error is avoided.
- In some cases where the database has many years of data and you receive an error importing, try to export/import the database in an nha format instead of nhax
Keeping databases at separate locations up to date
Some locations maintain servers at multiple offices and like to keep all databases up to date with activity from each office. If this routine is in place, do not export and import the entire database from each office. Use Advanced Search to locate updated records in a given time frame; for example Patient Activity for last 30 days, this will create an export and import of a manageable number of patients records.
