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The Fastest EMR Migration in Canadian Primary Care: Inside Terra Nova's Switch to Arya
How Terra Nova Modernized Primary Care Across BC — Without Missing a Single Day of Patient Care
When you're running Canada's largest primary care clinic chain, "downtime" isn't just an IT problem — it's a patient care problem.
That was the reality facing Terra Nova. With over 300 employees across 22+ clinic locations (and growing every month), their legacy EMR system had become a liability: frequent crashes, recurring slowdowns, and a growing sense that the platform simply couldn't keep pace with the organization's growth.
So Terra Nova made a decision most healthcare organizations spend years deliberating over: it was time to switch.
The Challenge
Migrating an EMR is never simple, but Terra Nova's situation raised the stakes considerably. The team needed to:
Consolidate 200,000+ patient files from multiple legacy EMR systems
Roll out the new platform across 22+ active clinic locations
Train and onboard 300+ staff members
Do all of this without disrupting a single day of patient care
For context, migrations of this scale and complexity are the kind of project that typically takes large institutions — including government health systems — years to complete.
Terra Nova didn't have years. They had a failing system and a growing network that needed a fix now.
The Approach
Working with Arya Health, Terra Nova executed a tightly phased, clinic-by-clinic rollout:
Assess — Mapping every legacy EMR and data source across all 22+ clinics
Migrate — Consolidating 200,000+ patient files into a single, unified platform
Train — Hands-on onboarding for clinical and administrative staff at every site
Go live — Rolling out clinic by clinic, with zero disruption to patient care
Just as important as the technical migration was the commitment to listening. Every piece of feedback from Terra Nova's clinicians and staff — over 3,300 emails and 1,265 Discord messages — was reviewed, triaged, and consolidated into a single master tracker to drive continuous improvement throughout the rollout.
The Results
The numbers speak for themselves:
200,000+ patient files migrated
22+ clinic locations implemented
Under 60 days total timeline
300+ staff trained and onboarded
94% satisfaction within the first month
16 Terra Nova-specific product improvements shipped, with more in progress
What typically takes organizations years to plan and implement, Arya delivered in weeks — at a fraction of the cost.
The Verdict
Perhaps the most telling measure of success came from the clinicians actually using the new system every day. Terra Nova's Medical Director put it simply:
"I have never, ever seen such an incredibly high-fidelity transmission of notes, imaging, prescriptions, and referrals from one EMR to another. Typically, the best you can hope for is a garbled CCD and a large PDF — but the Arya training team has truly outdone themselves, filling every section with precision and high fidelity. Honestly, I've never seen anything so well done before."
Built for What Comes Next
The work didn't stop at go-live. Arya's feedback tracker remains active, more product improvements are already underway, and the partnership is designed to scale as Terra Nova continues to grow — because a successful migration is the starting point, not the finish line.
For BC's largest primary care clinic chain, switching EMRs was never just about replacing software. It was about giving over 300 clinicians and staff a platform they could actually trust — and doing it fast enough that patients never noticed the transition at all.