My recommendations are not specific to v10… they apply to all upgrades and are a part of my normal "extra curricular" pre-upgrade steps. 
Make sure your upgrade team are true GE employees and not 3rd party consultants/outsourced temps! I have heard horror stories from other customers who used the 3rd party people and were unaware until after the fact.
If you have questions, are confused or do not feel completely informed, request a conference call with all upgrade team members. Do this as often as needed until you feel confident in the process–you're the customer.
Be sure you are sent any/all documentation, pre-upgrade checklists, companion guides, etc. regarding the upgrade and the version you are upgrading to.
Export your clinical content from Centricity and save it somewhere that will remain untouched by the upgrade. To go even further, break down your clinical kit exports into small pieces so you can pick-and-choose what to reimport and restore to your system without overwriting other items.
Make a copy of your entire DTS llogic folder. Save it to the same location as your clinical kits.
Make a copy of the Client folder from a known good/current/used-daily source. The Client folder will contain all your custom files and settings for the application (crystal reports, emr.ini file, mlsetvar.txt, etc.). If you have different configurations on different workstations (managers vs. general staff), be sure to backup each workstation's Client folder. Put this in the same location as the files you've backed up.
Make a copy of your jobs.txt file and Source folder (if using the function within Centricity) and save it to the same location as above.
Contact all of your third party vendors via email (go by the "if it's not written, it didn't happen" motto) letting them know your upgrading and ask what is needed on your end for the upgrade (what to backup, what to save, do you have to upgrade their product first, is their product upgrade backwards-compatible, does your current support contract cover the vendor to perform the required tasks, is there any downtime associated with the tasks, etc.). I usually send the same "canned" email to all my vendors stating: current centricity version, current 3rd party product version, upgrade date, upgrade centricity version, and any pertinent contact information for my facility (your own upgrade team).
When you run your last backup of your current Centricity database (right before upgrade), save that backup file somewhere in addition to where GE suggests. This may be overkill, but I always do it for my own piece-of-mind. Keep in mind when you are moving the .bak file that you may cause network slowness depending on your destination.
Those are the main ones that come to mind right away.
Good luck!
Posted : July 21, 2014 1:53 am
