Hasta La Vista Baby
According to Health Communication Network (HCN) only 7% of Medical Director users still use Medical Director 2.  It is now over 5 years since Medical Director 3 has been released and the more advanced features for eHealth, such as MD Exchange, ePrescribing and many decision support resources are only available in Medical Director 3.

HCN advises all the Medical Director 2 users should upgrade to Medical Director 3 before 1 November 2011. The October MD Ref (database of medications) will be the last for Medical Director 2 users.

The practices will be able to use Medical Director 2 until May 2012, however they must understand that their MD Ref will not be updated and thus will be progressively out of date. In 2012 the Medical Director 2 users will start getting “our of date” messages upon logging into the software. The absolute deadline for decommissioning Medical Director 2 will be 30 April 2011.

The existing Medical Director 2 users thus have 9 months to either upgrade to Medical Director 3 or migrate their database to other clinical software.  In some cases however this might also require upgrading the practice IT system due to Medical Director 3 being more resource intensive on processing power and memory.  You can find the recommended system requirements on the following site.
http://www.hcn.com.au/uploads/System_Requirements_for_MD-PS3.12_and_BC2.6.70.pdf

I recommend that you start considering the upgrade or migration to other clinical software well prior to the deadline announced by the HCN to avoid stress and last minute complications. While CSGPN does not perform IT services such as upgrades or migrations, I can recommend IT providers who do have experience in this area.  If you require any advice on how to approach decommissioning Medical Director 2 please contact me on 9799 0933.