Day one should be boring.
A new location has one chance to open well. Every dependency — the circuit, the cabling, the EHR connection, the card reader, the phones — has a lead time, and they do not run in parallel by accident.
What has to happen, and how early
The single most common cause of a bad opening is starting IT after the construction is finished.
| When | What | Why it is that early |
|---|---|---|
| 90+ days out | Internet circuit ordered; secondary path identified | Business circuits routinely take 60–90 days. This is the item that delays openings. |
| 75 days out | Network design, cabling plan, IT room location agreed with the architect or GC | Cabling has to go in before walls close. Retrofitting a practice costs multiples of doing it right. |
| 60 days out | Cabling installed; equipment specified and ordered | Hardware lead times move. Ordering late is how a practice opens on a consumer router. |
| 45 days out | EHR vendor engaged on migration or new-site provisioning | Vendor scheduling is the constraint, not the work itself. |
| 30 days out | Network, servers, wi-fi and segmentation built and tested | So there is time to find what is wrong while it is still fixable. |
| 14 days out | Workstations imaged and placed; printers, scanners, card readers, phones | Staff need to touch it before patients do. |
| 7 days out | Full dry run — check in a test patient end to end | Every gap surfaces in the dry run or it surfaces in front of a real patient. |
| Day one | On-site presence through the first clinic day | Because something always comes up, and it should be us who handles it. |
Moving is harder than opening
A move has a constraint an opening does not: the practice has to keep seeing patients on both sides of it. That means the new site is built and tested while the old one is still live, the cutover happens across a weekend, and the old site stays recoverable until the new one has run a full clinic week.
A second location adds a different problem — two sites that need to behave like one practice. Shared authentication, consistent access, one place to call, and network paths between them that carry clinical traffic reliably. Designed once at the start, this is straightforward. Bolted on later, it is a rebuild.
Opening, moving or adding a location?
Talk to us before the walls close. The earlier the conversation, the cheaper and calmer the opening.