You can leave Practo Ray without losing your patient base. Ray’s settings include a self-serve Import/Export screen that emails you four kinds of data: Contact, Treatment, Expenses, and Appointments, per Practo’s own help pages. That covers the patient list. It doesn’t promise structured clinical history, so the safe plan treats old records as a reference archive and starts new visits clean.
This guide is the mechanics of the move. If you’re still deciding whether to leave at all, read the Practo Ray alternatives comparison first. This page assumes you’ve decided, and its whole job is to make the switch boring.
Key takeaways
- Ray’s help pages document a self-serve export of 4 data types (Contact, Treatment, Expenses, Appointments), delivered by email.
- Prescriptions and uploaded files aren’t named in that export list. Get their handling confirmed in writing before you cancel.
- Your free Practo listing is independent of Ray. Leaving the software doesn’t delist you from the marketplace.
- Keep Ray read-only for 60–90 days of overlap. New visits start clean on day one.
- Patient Square starts at ₹1,599 per clinician per month on annual billing plus 18% GST; the bundled AI EHR arrives at the ₹2,399 Copilot tier.
What does Practo Ray actually export?
Start with what’s documented, because most migration horror stories begin with assumptions.
Practo’s help pages describe an Import/Export section inside Ray’s settings. You tick the data you want, enter an email address, and click Export to email. Four categories are named: Contact, Treatment, Expenses, and Appointments. There’s also a Completed Exports list showing everything already sent from your account. That’s a real, self-serve exit door, and Practo deserves credit for shipping one. Plenty of Indian clinic software makes you beg.
Now the gaps. The help page doesn’t state the file format, and prescriptions and uploaded documents don’t appear among the four categories. Maybe support pulls those for you on request. Their public pages don’t promise it, so treat it as unconfirmed until you have an answer in writing. One email settles it: ask support exactly what a complete export includes, in what format, and how long it takes. Send that email before you touch anything else.
We think this export-first habit is the best single test of any clinic software vendor, including us. A vendor confident you’ll stay makes leaving easy.
Your Practo listing doesn’t leave with Ray
Here’s the part that stops many clinics from switching, and it’s based on a misreading. Practo states that the doctor listing itself is free and independent of its paid products. Ray is the practice-management subscription. The profile that brings you bookings is a separate, free thing.
So cancelling Ray doesn’t delist you. Patients still find your profile, still book you. What changes is the plumbing: those bookings stop flowing into a Ray calendar you’re paying for. Your front desk needs a new place to watch for them, whether that’s the free Practo tools, a phone confirmation habit, or the scheduling module in whatever you move to.
Decide that routing before the switch, not during it. A booking nobody saw is a no-show you caused.
Map the export to the system you’re joining
Four export categories, four different destinations. This table is the whole migration on one screen.
| Ray export category | What it holds | Where it should land | Watch for |
|---|---|---|---|
| Contact | Your patient list: names, numbers, registration details | The new system’s patient directory | Duplicate patients under slightly different spellings; verify mobile numbers are 10 digits |
| Appointments | Past and upcoming bookings | Only the next 2–3 weeks matter; enter upcoming visits by hand if needed | Reconfirm the next fortnight by phone or WhatsApp so nobody falls through |
| Treatment | Treatment records as Ray stores them | A read-only reference archive | May not map to structured fields in another system; don’t budget time for re-keying it |
| Expenses | Clinic expense entries | Your accounting workflow, not the EMR | GST filings need continuity; hand this to whoever does your books |
| Not listed: prescriptions, files | Unconfirmed | Written request to Practo support | Get the answer in writing before cancelling |
The pattern to accept early: the patient list moves as data, the patient history mostly moves as documents. Indian EMR-to-EMR migrations almost never carry structured clinical history cleanly, whoever the vendors are. Fighting that costs weeks. Planning around it costs a spreadsheet.
Your first OPD week off Ray, day by day
A 60-patient Monday is not the day to discover a login problem. Sequence it like this.
The Friday before. Run the Ray export. Open every file and spot-check five real patients against what you remember. Load the contact list into the new system. Keep your Ray login alive; you’re overlapping, not cancelling.
Monday. Front desk works from the imported patient directory. The doctor starts the scribe on every visit, so each consult produces a structured note minutes after the patient leaves. Nothing needs to be back-filled tonight.
Tuesday. A regular asks about the tablet she was given in March. This is the read-only moment: look it up in Ray, attach the old record to her chart in the new system, move on. Expect a handful of these a day for the first month, then almost none.
Wednesday to Saturday. Reconcile the appointment book each evening against Practo-profile bookings and walk-ins. By the weekend you’ll know exactly which routing gaps exist, while they’re still cheap to fix.
The reason week one stays calm is that the documentation isn’t manual. The AI Medical Scribe by Patient Square is one module inside Practice Copilot, our AI platform for the whole practice, and it listens during the visit and hands back a structured SOAP note, ICD-10 suggestions, and a prescription draft, ready to review and sign about two minutes after the visit. Your searchable record rebuilds at OPD speed because every visit writes itself. Consults can run in English, Hindi, or code-mixed Hinglish; the note always comes out in clean clinical English.
What does the other side cost?
Ray’s site puts pricing behind a sales flow, so any figure you’ve seen is third-party. Listings cluster roughly between ₹1,000 and ₹6,000 per doctor per month depending on plan and clinic size. Our Practo Ray pricing decode digs into the tiers properly, so we won’t repeat it here.
Patient Square publishes its numbers. Assist, the scribe-led documentation plan, is ₹1,599 per clinician per month on annual billing, ex-GST. With 18% GST the invoice reads about ₹1,887. Copilot, which adds the bundled AI Copilot EHR and WhatsApp messaging, is ₹2,399 per month annual, ex-GST. No per-note charges, no setup fee, unlimited visits on every plan. The full ladder is on the India pricing page.
One symmetry worth checking while you’re evaluating exit doors: every Patient Square plan includes EHR-ready export (PDF · HL7 · FHIR), stated on the pricing page. Judge the software you’re joining by the same standard as the one you’re leaving. There’s also a 7-day trial, which fits neatly inside your overlap window; run it on a real clinic day, not a quiet one.
When staying on Practo Ray is the right call
Not every clinic should make this move, and pretending otherwise would make the rest of this page less useful to you.
Stay if Practo’s marketplace is what fills your chairs. Ray plus the consumer app is a demand engine, and if new-patient bookings matter more to you than charting time, that combination is genuinely hard to replace with a standalone clinical tool. Ray is the better fit for that clinic.
Stay if you’re mid-subscription and the pain is mild. Time the switch to your renewal date and use the months in between to run the export test and a trial.
Switch when documentation is the drain: notes compressed to one line, evenings spent on records, a register that wouldn’t defend you in a dispute. That’s the problem Ray was never built to solve and the one an ambient scribe removes. Our data handling, DPDP Act 2023 posture, and the honest note that ABDM integration is on our roadmap, not live, are all on the security page. When you’re ready,