Our SW company was bought out. We are now in the process of extracting our customer's data to put it into the new SW.

We have encountered so many flaws in the data being extracted, and we think much of it is based on the design flaws of the software. For example there is a relationship code between the patient and their contacts. We have facilities that have added over 25 different relations for daughters with misspellings, secondary types like "daught/POA", "daugt/POA" and "daughter/POA", etc. We think the cause is that the end user wasn't limited to the dropdown list but could add them on the fly. Where a good design would have forced them to pick from a dropdown list only when adding the contact. Then have a second location to add to the dropdown list. It might be able to be restricted who could add relationship types, but even if not, it still is a deliberate choice.

The same issue is cropping up all over. So now we have to cleanup the data as we go and try and figure out what was in the end-user's mind at the time.