Medical office management software

Question

Hi everyone. 
I'm a little new here and I'm in need of studying TSQL. I have used it in the past, but it's been many years, and I barely touched on it. Mostly for simple things for an old project I did in the 90's. 
Anyway, I'm trying to help a friend, my doctor clean up some data he has in a database on his server. It's SQL 2012. 
Here's the problem. 
He purchased a canned system that helps him keep track of patients. He has around 1k records. Each record is updated when a patient comes in for an appointment. But, because he coudln't get access to the old records of the patient from a previous office visit,
he was just kept adding new information to the same patients initial record each time they came in, making a few of the fields huge over time of course.
He did this because he didn't realize what it would do, and because the GUI was too hard to work with, requiring him too many actions, or clicks, and no screen to see previous office visit appointment information that is vital for the current patient visit,
for prescribing meds, medical advice, for compliance, etc,. 
He tells me he just needs to strip out the last date and any info from the last date in one field. I'm assuming finding that record and then finding that date, and then trying to strip out the the text of that field and capturing it, and inserting it in
another table that I'd design for said purpose would work? But, I'm only wondering if this would work if the date is related to the text input each time? How would this be so? Since he used the same field for inputting the information in each patient record,
I'm wondering if the info would be stored in another table, and I'd think it would as normalization would require each patient to hopefully have information stored in a related table with visit information or something, but I've not seen the tables, and another
thing that this brings up, is legal and ethical issues, in that I'm wondering if it is allowable to look at said information since he purchased a canned program? I don't want to step on others feet so to speak, but just to help this guy who's a jewel of a
doctor considering I have a chronic illness and he realizes I don't have many resources and doesn't or hasn't in the past even charged me money at times. Something rare I'd suggest in the medical field today! :-) 
If this is legal, and he owns his own data as it would seem to me, and as long as I didn't bother the canned front end software, it would seem this should be doable from a current rational thinking here in the moment as I speak about this, but I don't know.
! Yikes. :-)  Anyway, I'd really appreciate any insight anyone here can help with. 
If not a legal problem, would TSQL work well for this do you think? 
I hope it's ok to ask such a question here? 
Thanks so much in advance. 
Tim

Answer 1

Very many questions. As for the technical ones, they are impossible to answer without seeing the tables and the data. But I do get a feeling of an Augean stable here...
As for the ethical part of it, there are two aspects. One is the relation to the canned program. This depends on the license, and the doctor is reponsibly if your would be a breach against this agreement. But I would expect this to be too much of a deal.
The more difficult part is that you will undoubtedly see a lot of sensitive patient data, and how legal this would be is nothing I can answer. You will need to talk with a lawyer where you live. But reasonbly, the doctor is responsible for sharing the data
with you, and he could be held responsible if you disclose any of the information you see.
Erland Sommarskog, SQL Server MVP, [email protected]