Ways to Resolve Data Corruption or Reduce the Probability of It Occurring in Your Medisoft Database

At times, it can be tricky to figure out what caused data corruption to occur. Sometimes, it is caused by information being only half written to the database. In this situation, Medisoft will read the record and if only half of the record is present, will respond by reading it as an error.

Some of the symptoms which may occur in your Medisoft if you have data corruption present could be:

Error messages- One or more, out of a variety of at least 100 different error messages, will pop up on your screen. Pay attention to the error message. Does it tell you where in the database the corruption is? Write it down and go to www.medisoft.com to the "Medisoft Knowledge Base" under the "Support" tab and enter your error message into the search field. Perhaps there will be information pulled up that can help you trouble shoot on your own.

Missing data- Data may be missing off of reports.

Sorting- Things may not be sorted correctly in Medisoft.

Frozen- Your Medisoft may "freeze up" with out displaying an error message.

Medisoft Data Corruption Trouble Shooting

Step One- File Maintenance- Run "File Maintenance" (If Medisoft will allow you to.) and see if that will correct the problem(s).
What does File Maintenance do? Indexes are the last things to be written in Medisoft. If your session in Medisoft is interrupted for some reason like say a power failure, the indexes are the pieces that become corrupted. Running File Maintenance will re-build or write the indexes so they are no longer corrupted.

Step Two- Restore your database from your backup.
Worried about maintaining a dependable backup? See the Services tab for information about our HIPAA compliant Back Up Service for $6 per month.

If you complete steps 1 and 2 and you still have problems, it may be time to enlist the services of someone who provides Medisoft Support.

Here are four things you can do to position yourself to be able to resolve data corruption or help to prevent it-

Perform regular backups. The back up will be useless if it isn't done properly. (Stored offsite, tested for completeness.)
Run File Maintenance in Medisoft. Gavin recommends doing this every week.
Properly shut down Medisoft. Exit at the end of the day instead of leaving Medisoft open.
Keep a UPS on your server. Having a battery in place as back up power will keep your server going and allow users enough time to exit Medisoft properly in the event of power loss.

We put this guide together for you, but following it is still no guarantee that at some point, you will not experience data corruption. Hopefully, you never will, but if unfortunately it does happen, we do data repair which typically runs $300. Data repair involves searching your entire database to find the corrupted files and get them fixed.