Decommissioning the Undecommissionable: Migrating 60 million records without dropping a single one

Replacing legacy infrastructure across 60 million records

The challenge

A national body needed to migrate its primary care registration function from a 30-year-old legacy system onto a modern platform. The incumbent held over 60 million records and was used daily by thousands of organisations. Decommissioning it while maintaining service continuity was the central challenge.

What we did

Aire Logic delivered across several workstreams: migration of registration management functionality, development of a demographic management application used by staff to resolve patient record issues and duplicates, a reporting service, and an additional service component. The platform ran on Python microservices with Riak as the database layer, RabbitMQ for message queuing, and Redis for caching, operating within a wider national infrastructure at scale.

Delivery governance

Delivery management was a significant part of the engagement. When the Aire Logic delivery manager joined the programme, the team had no sprint velocity measurement, no risk management process, unsized epics, no product manager, and stakeholders who were not attending sprint reviews. Over several months the team introduced pod-based working, formal product backlog ownership, a RACI matrix, a risk log, regular stakeholder sprint reviews, and dedicated test resource. Sprint output improved measurably and the programme moved from reactive to roadmap-driven.

User acceptance

User acceptance testing with real end users (back-office staff at support organisations) was conducted for each significant change to the demographic management application. Feedback was translated into user stories and prioritised for delivery.