Switch from DGL Practice Manager to Ask Brigid: Migration Guide

Why Irish consultants are leaving DGL Practice Manager

Most consultants who switch from DGL do so for one of three reasons: the platform's insurer billing workflows have not kept pace with how VHI, Laya Healthcare and Irish Life now process pre-authorisations; the dictation and letter-generation tools feel bolted on rather than native; or the per-site licensing model becomes hard to justify once a consultant is operating across three or four private hospitals. None of these is fatal on its own, but together they create enough friction to prompt a serious look at alternatives.

DGL Practice Manager has been a fixture in Irish private specialist practice for well over a decade. It handles appointment scheduling, basic invoicing and some insurer integrations competently enough. The issue is less what it does and more what it has stopped doing relative to where Irish private practice is moving. Consultants running busy urology, gynaecology or cardiology lists across the Beacon, Mater Private or Blackrock Clinic increasingly need AI-assisted letter drafting, automated pre-auth tracking by insurer, and patient-facing digital intake -- features that require meaningful product investment to deliver well.

Pricing is a secondary but real factor. DGL's per-module, per-site structure means a consultant working from two or three locations can be paying for effectively separate implementations. A flat-rate alternative covering all sites under one subscription changes the arithmetic quickly.

The DGL Practice Manager Alternative Ireland 2026 post on this blog covers the broader competitive field. This article focuses purely on migration mechanics: what to extract, how to structure the import, and how to keep your clinic running during the transition.

Switching practice management software is a project, not an afternoon's work. A realistic timeline for a solo consultant with a medical secretary is four to six weeks from decision to confident live operation. A two-consultant practice with a shared admin team should plan for eight weeks. That reflects the volume of structured data, document templates and insurer-specific configurations that accumulate in any system after a few years of use.

For a broader comparison of what is available in the Irish market, the Best Practice Management Software Ireland 2026 guide is worth reading before you commit to a direction.

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What to export from DGL before you cancel your licence

Before cancelling your DGL licence, export four categories of data: the full patient demographic file, the complete appointment and visit history, all outstanding and historical invoices with insurer claim references, and any document templates your secretary uses regularly. Most practices underestimate the document template category -- these take longer to recreate from scratch than any structured data file.

DGL allows data export through its reporting module, but the output formats are not always clean. Expect some manual reformatting before any import tool can read them. Here is what to request or extract, and in what format:

1. Patient demographics: Full name, date of birth, address, email, phone, GP name and address, referring consultant (where applicable), insurer membership number and scheme. Export as CSV. Check for duplicate patient records before you export -- DGL does not always merge duplicates automatically, and importing 200 phantom duplicates into a new system creates weeks of cleanup work.
2. Appointment history: Date, time, appointment type, consulting location, attending clinician, and any associated clinical notes flag (you will not import the notes themselves at this stage -- see below). This is your audit trail and your follow-up scheduling reference.
3. Financial records: All invoices raised in the past six years (the Revenue-mandated retention period for business records under Irish tax law), with payment status, insurer claim numbers, VHI/Laya/Irish Life scheme codes, and any outstanding balances. Export to CSV and generate a PDF copy for your own archive before the licence closes.
4. Document templates: Referral letter templates, discharge summaries, clinic letter headers, consent form text, and any standard operating instructions your secretary has built in DGL's word processing module. Export these as Word or RTF files. There is no universal import path for templates -- they will need to be rebuilt in your new platform's template engine, but having the source text saves the time of reconstructing them from memory.
5. Clinical correspondence archive: Letters sent and received, stored against patient records. These are typically the hardest category. DGL stores them in a proprietary format in many configurations. Request a bulk PDF export from your DGL account manager before you give notice -- this is your GDPR-compliant patient record archive and you are legally obliged to retain it regardless of what system you move to. The Data Protection Commission's guidance on data retention is the reference point here.

Do not cancel your DGL licence the day you go live on a new platform. Keep read-only access for at least 90 days post-migration. You will need it to answer queries about historical invoices, pull correspondence for patients who request their records, and cross-check anything that looks anomalous in the new system.

How to structure the data import into Ask Brigid

A successful import into Ask Brigid (formerly MedProAI) starts with cleaning the data before it touches the new system, not after. The 48-hour onboarding process covers configuration and system setup, but the quality of your imported data depends entirely on what you hand over. A dirty CSV produces a dirty patient list, and that costs your secretary hours of correction time in week one.

The import sequence matters. Follow this order:

1. GP and referrer records first. Import your referring GP list and any external consultant records before patient demographics. Patients reference these records -- if the referrer field in a patient record points to a GP that does not yet exist in the new system, the import either errors or leaves the field blank.
2. Patient demographics second. Clean the CSV before import: standardise date formats (DD/MM/YYYY throughout), remove any rows where date of birth is missing, and resolve duplicates. One canonical record per patient, with the most recent contact details.
3. Insurer and scheme configuration third. Map your VHI, Laya, Irish Life, Aviva and any other insurer scheme codes before you import invoice history. If your new system's insurer codes do not match what was in DGL, every historical invoice will show an unrecognised scheme and reconciliation becomes painful.
4. Invoice history fourth. Import historical invoices as a closed archive -- you are retaining them for reference, not re-opening them for processing. Flag outstanding balances separately so your secretary can action them in the new system without confusion about which platform they belong to.
5. Document templates last. These are manual recreations, not imports. Block half a day for your secretary to rebuild the ten most-used letter templates in the new system's template editor. The rest can be added over the first two weeks of live operation as the need arises.

One specific issue worth flagging for urology practices: PSA follow-up pathways and prostate cancer surveillance schedules are often managed as a mix of appointment recurrences and free-text clinical notes in DGL. Neither migrates cleanly into a structured recall pathway. Before going live, audit your active surveillance patients manually -- anyone on a three-monthly or six-monthly elevated PSA recall -- and re-enter them into the new system's recall function directly. This is a patient safety point, not a data hygiene one.

Retraining your secretary and admin team for the new workflow

Most migration projects fail at the human layer, not the technical one. A medical secretary who has used DGL for five years has keyboard shortcuts and muscle memory that no amount of written guidance fully replaces. The goal of retraining is not to teach the new software from scratch but to map familiar tasks to their new equivalents, so existing competence transfers rather than disappears.

The most effective retraining approach we have seen in Irish private practices is a parallel-running period of two weeks, where the secretary processes every new booking, invoice and letter in both systems simultaneously. It is inefficient by design. It surfaces every workflow gap quickly, under real conditions, and it builds confidence before the old system is switched off.

Four tasks account for roughly 80% of a medical secretary's daily interaction with practice management software:

• Booking and rescheduling appointments, including managing waitlists
• Raising and submitting insurer invoices
• Generating and sending clinic letters and referrals
• Answering patient queries about appointments, billing and results

Focus retraining time on these four tasks first. Everything else -- reporting, template management, system configuration -- can be learned over the first month of live operation without disrupting the clinic.

For practices with a remote or part-time secretary, schedule a one-hour video call at the end of day one of live operation and again at the end of day three. These checkpoints catch problems before they compound. A secretary stuck on invoice submission on day one who does not raise it until day five has five days of billing backlog to clear.

'The system change was the easy part. Getting [the secretary] comfortable enough to stop checking DGL for every booking took about ten days. After that, she preferred the new setup.' -- A urologist we spoke to during our onboarding research, reporting on their own migration experience.

The for-consultants page outlines the specific workflows the platform is built around -- useful to share with your admin team before retraining so they understand what the system is designed to do, not just how individual screens work.

Going live: a phased cutover plan for private practices

A phased cutover keeps one system fully operational while the other is being validated. For most private Irish consultant practices, a three-phase approach works: configuration and data import in weeks one and two, parallel operation in weeks three and four, and full cutover in week five. The exact timing shifts depending on clinic volume, the number of sites you operate from, and whether you have one secretary or three.

Phase	Weeks	Activity	Who owns it
1. Setup	1-2	Data export from DGL, data cleaning, import into new system, insurer configuration, template rebuild	Consultant + secretary + onboarding support
2. Parallel run	3-4	All new bookings, invoices and letters processed in both systems; DGL remains the system of record for billing	Secretary, with consultant reviewing daily
3. Cutover	5	New system becomes the system of record; DGL moved to read-only archive access; outstanding DGL invoices chased and closed	Consultant signs off; secretary executes
4. Archive period	Weeks 6-18	DGL access retained for historical queries only; no new records created; licence reviewed for cancellation after 90 days	Secretary

Two practical notes on timing. Do not start a migration during a period when your theatre list is at maximum volume. Elective surgical planning periods, or weeks when you are covering a colleague's outpatient list, are the wrong moment to introduce administrative change. If your practice spans multiple sites -- say, Hermitage Clinic and Bons Secours -- configure both in the new system and validate appointment booking at each location before you go live with either. A configuration error on one site is easier to catch in testing than during a live clinic.

The RCSI's guidance on clinical governance in private practice, while focused on surgical safety rather than software, applies a useful principle here: change should be introduced under controlled conditions, with a named person accountable for each step. In a solo practice, that is usually the consultant. In a larger setting, it is usually the practice manager.

Common migration problems and how to avoid them

The majority of migration problems in private Irish practices fall into five categories, most of them predictable.

Duplicate patient records. DGL does not always enforce a single master record per patient, particularly in practices where multiple users have booking access. A patient who attended your Beacon clinic and your Blackrock clinic on separate occasions may exist twice. Before import, deduplicate using date of birth and PPS number as the matching key -- not name alone, which produces false matches and missed merges in equal measure.

Insurer scheme code mismatches. VHI alone operates multiple scheme tiers, and the scheme code recorded in DGL may not map directly to the equivalent in your new system. Request a scheme code reference list from each insurer's provider relations team before you begin the invoice import. VHI's provider portal and Laya's equivalent both carry current scheme directories. Getting this wrong means invoices submitted under the wrong scheme code are rejected, and re-submission delays payment by weeks.

Missing clinical correspondence. Letters stored in DGL's document module are not always exported in a complete bulk operation -- some configurations store attachments in a separate file path. Do a test export of a single patient's complete record, including all attached correspondence, before you run the full export. If attachments are missing from the test, raise it with DGL support before you give notice.

Recall and follow-up list gaps. Any patient on an active recall pathway -- PSA surveillance, haematuria follow-up, post-operative wound review -- needs to be verified manually against your new system's recall list after import. Automated recall schedules do not always migrate from one system to another even when the appointment history does. A manual check of your active recall list takes a few hours. Missing a three-month PSA follow-up call for a patient on active surveillance has consequences that are not administrative.

Secretary confidence failure. This is the most common cause of migration projects stalling. The secretary reverts to DGL for everything, the parallel period extends indefinitely, and the consultant eventually gives up on the transition. Set a hard cutover date at the start of the project and treat the parallel-run period as time-limited by design. Two weeks of parallel operation is usually enough. Three weeks occasionally. More than four weeks and you are not running parallel -- you are running two permanent systems.

For anyone still evaluating whether a move is warranted, the detailed feature and pricing comparison on the Ask Brigid vs DGL page covers the specific functional differences worth weighing.

The practical next step is to open DGL, go to your reporting module, and run a test export of one patient's complete record including attachments. That single check tells you immediately how clean your data export will be and whether you need to involve DGL support before beginning a full migration. It takes ten minutes and removes the most common source of last-minute surprises.

Ask Brigid (formerly MedProAI) offers a 7-day free trial for Irish practices with no credit card required and 48-hour setup. Start at auth.medproai.com.

Frequently asked questions about switch from dgl

How long does it take to switch from DGL Practice Manager to Ask Brigid?

Timelines vary by practice size, but most single-consultant practices complete the full switch within four to six weeks when they follow a structured plan covering export, import, testing and staff training.

Will my historical patient records transfer across from DGL?

DGL allows export of core data such as patient demographics and appointment history; your Ask Brigid onboarding contact can advise on the specific file formats accepted during import so nothing is left behind.

Does Ask Brigid work with Irish private health insurers like VHI and Laya?

Ask Brigid is built for the Irish private practice market and supports the billing and claims workflows used by consultants dealing with insurers including VHI and Laya Healthcare.

What is Meet Brigid and how does it affect the migration?

Meet Brigid is a patient-facing app that puts patients in control of their own bookings, bills and documents shared by the practice. Patients can link one account to multiple clinics and choose what information to share into each, which can reduce admin volume once the practice goes live on Ask Brigid.

Can I run DGL and Ask Brigid at the same time during the handover?

Yes, running both systems in parallel during a defined handover window is a practical way to avoid gaps in billing or referral management while the team builds confidence on the new platform.