Tessera Health brings 38 clinics onto a single patient record

The challenge

Every system Tessera had inherited worked, more or less, for the clinic that chose it. None worked for the group. A patient's allergies might be recorded in one system and not another. A specialist clinic receiving a referral re-typed the patient's details from a PDF. Reports for regulators were assembled by hand from five exports each quarter.

Clinical staff were wary. Several had been through a failed system change elsewhere, and they knew that a bad Monday morning in a clinic means patients turned away.

The approach

Tessera chose one established record platform, and we agreed early to configure it rather than customize it. Across the whole program we made fewer than 20 changes to the product itself. That keeps upgrades simple, and it means Tessera's team can run the platform without us.

The hardest part was the patients themselves. Five systems held 512,000 records, many describing the same person with a different spelling, an old address or a missing date of birth. Automated matching combined them into 420,000 patients. The 6,300 uncertain matches were reviewed one by one by clinical staff, never by the algorithm alone.

“We moved clinics at weekends so that Monday was a normal day. Our super users knew the new system better than we did by the time it arrived.”

Clinics moved in eight waves of four to six, always from Friday evening to Sunday. Two super users in each clinic were trained four weeks ahead, and our engineers were on site at every clinic on the Monday morning after its move. Tessera's clinical safety lead signed off every data mapping before it ran.

What changed in the clinics

• Every clinician sees a patient's full history from every Tessera clinic in one place.
• Allergies, medicines and alerts are recorded once and shown everywhere.
• Referrals arrive as part of the record, the same day, with nothing to re-type.
• Regulatory reports run from one system in minutes, not from five exports over days.

The outcome

The last wave moved in June 2026. Today every one of Tessera's 38 clinics works from a single patient record. Finding a patient's full history takes under 30 seconds, where it used to take six minutes and several logins. Duplicate tests have fallen by 22%, and referrals arrive the same day instead of after five.

0Documents lost out of 2.1 million migrated, checked by count and checksum for every clinic.

Tessera's own team now runs the platform and the training program for new staff. The next clinic to join the group will move onto the shared record in a single weekend, using the same playbook.