Attua / Industries / Medical practices

AI for general practices and specialist clinics

In a medical practice the only question that matters is which side of the line a task sits on. So this page sorts the work into three groups: never, drafted and checked, and safe to run quietly. Everything else follows from that sort.

Book a discovery call

The context

Why the practice manager is the busiest person in the building

A practice of 6 doctors is a clinical business wrapped in an administrative one. The clinical part is bounded by appointments. The administrative part is not. Recalls and reminders, results and correspondence, claiming through Medicare Online, health fund and Department of Veterans' Affairs paperwork, the accreditation cycle, the Practice Incentives Program measures, rostering, registrar supervision records, equipment logs, cold chain records, complaints.

Most of that lands on one practice manager who has no clinical authority and no spare afternoon. Meanwhile the doctors are losing evenings to documentation, which is the single most common reason a good general practitioner reduces their sessions.

There is no shortage of vendors offering to help. The problem is that the pitch rarely distinguishes between tasks where a mistake is an inconvenience and tasks where a mistake is a patient harm. That distinction is the whole job, so it comes first on this page rather than last.

The sort

Sorting practice work into three groups

Every candidate task gets one question asked of it: if this goes wrong, who is hurt and would anybody notice in time? That question produces three groups, and the group determines the design rather than the other way around.

Group oneClinical judgement and anything that can mask it
Group twoPatient facing work with a clinician in front of it
Group threeAdministrative work with no clinical content

Vendors sell across all three at once. A practice that sorts first ends up with a shorter list, a defensible position and something that actually gets used, because the staff can tell you which group a task is in without looking it up.

Group one

Never, regardless of what the demonstration showed

These are excluded completely. Not with supervision, not with a confidence threshold, not later once everyone is comfortable. Software that performs a clinical function can be a medical device under Australian therapeutic goods law and needs to be assessed as one, and in any case a practitioner's obligations to the Medical Board of Australia do not transfer to a vendor.

Clinical triage. Deciding whether a caller or a presentation needs to be seen today, or at all.
Diagnosis, differential diagnosis, or any suggestion shaped like one in a patient facing message.
Interpreting pathology, imaging or screening results, including deciding which results are normal.
Prescribing, dose adjustment or medication review.
Deciding whether a patient needs a recall, or sending a recall without a practitioner's instruction.
Choosing a Medicare Benefits Schedule item number for a consultation.
Answering a clinical question from a patient in any channel, including a reply drafted for reception to send.

The item number exclusion surprises people. It belongs here because the billing practitioner is accountable for claims made in their name, and because an item number encodes a clinical judgement about what happened in the room.

Group two

Drafted, then read and owned by a clinician

This is where most of the value sits, and the design rule is uniform: the output is a draft, the clinician edits it, and the clinician owns what results. Nothing in this group reaches a patient or another practitioner without that step.

Consultation notes from a recorded encounter, with the patient's consent, for the practitioner to correct and sign.
Referral letters to specialists, assembled from the record so the history and current medicines are already in place.
Letters back to a referring doctor after a specialist consultation.
Chronic condition management plan preparation, with the clinical content written by the practitioner.
Incoming correspondence identified, matched to the right patient and summarised so a shorter document is read.
Care coordination summaries for a patient with several providers involved.
Patient information and consent material drafted from your own approved content.

Documentation is the big one. A note drafted while the consultation is fresh is more complete than one typed at 7pm, and the practitioners who value this most are usually the ones who were taking work home.

Group three

Safe to run quietly in the background

Administrative work with no clinical content. It still gets a person at the end where money or a patient relationship is involved, but it does not need a practitioner, and this is the group a practice manager will thank you for.

Claim rejection and exception review from Medicare Online and your health fund terminals, grouped by cause.
Accreditation evidence assembly against the standards your accrediting agency assesses.
Quality improvement measure commentary drafted from your own data in Cubiko or PenCS.
Roster drafting with costs shown, including registrar and nursing coverage.
Staff compliance tracking: registration currency, immunisation records, mandatory training, police checks.
Supplier invoices, equipment service records and cold chain documentation.
Appointment reminder and failure to attend follow up, where no clinical content is involved.
Recruitment, onboarding packs and position descriptions.

Scribes

Scribes, consent and what the regulator expects

Ambient documentation is the first thing most practices try and the first place they get into trouble, usually not through the technology. The Australian Health Practitioner Regulation Agency and the Medical Board have published guidance on meeting professional obligations when using these tools, and the Royal Australian College of General Practitioners has published its own material on scribes specifically. Read both before you buy anything.

The practical conditions are consistent. The patient has to know and agree, and the agreement has to be recorded. The practitioner has to read the note and correct it, because the note is their record and a plausible sentence they did not say is their problem. You have to know where the audio and the transcript are held, for how long, and under whose jurisdiction. And your privacy policy and collection statement have to describe what actually happens rather than what happened before you started.

Done on those terms it is one of the clearest wins available to a practice. Done by a practitioner who installed something themselves without telling the practice manager, it is a notifiable breach waiting to happen.

Paperwork

Accreditation and incentive paperwork, which never stops

The accreditation cycle

Evidence against the standards your agency assesses, collected continuously rather than assembled in a panic. Policies, logs, registers and training records drafted into the shape the assessors ask for.

Quality improvement measures

The incentive measures need data and commentary. Your own practice data already answers the first part. Drafting the commentary, with the clinical interpretation left to a practitioner, answers the second.

Registration and patient enrolment

Patient registration arrangements and the reporting around them add another administrative layer. Reconciling who is registered against who is actually being seen is list work.

None of this is glamorous and all of it is time. A practice manager who gets 2 days a month back from the paperwork cycle usually spends it on the things that are genuinely their job, which is staff and patients.

For the sequence before any build, see AI strategy, then AI implementation.

Systems

Clinical software and the reporting layer around it

Best Practice, MedicalDirector or Zedmed: Clinical records as a read source for correspondence drafts and list building. Nothing is written into a clinical record by a workflow.
Genie Solutions, Gentu or Shexie: Specialist practice workflow: referrals in, letters out, theatre lists and the paperwork around informed financial consent.
HotDoc, HealthEngine or Automed: Appointment reminders, failure to attend follow up and recall messaging, sent on a practitioner's instruction rather than automatically.
Cubiko, PenCS or your population health tool: The data behind quality improvement commentary and a weekly read a practice manager can act on.
HealthLink, Medical Objects or Argus: Incoming correspondence identified, matched to a patient and summarised. Clinical reading stays with the practitioner.
Medicare Online, Tyro and HICAPS: Claim exceptions and rejections grouped by cause, with the pattern named rather than a list to work through.

How it runs

Where a practice should start, and in what order

A Diagnostic first. Several days in the practice, not in a meeting room: time at reception during the morning rush, time with the practice manager on the claiming and accreditation cycle, and a session with 2 or 3 practitioners about what they are taking home. The sort described above is done with your people rather than presented to them, because they need to be able to defend it afterwards.

Then one group three workflow and one group two workflow, 4 to 6 weeks, running beside the current process. Starting with an administrative one builds confidence without clinical risk while the clinical one is tested properly. The measure for the drafted work is whether the practitioner edits lightly or rewrites, and if it is rewriting we stop rather than persevere.

Illustrative example, not a client story

Example scenario: a correspondence backlog in a 6 doctor practice

Picture a general practice with 6 doctors, 2 nurses and 3 reception staff. Incoming correspondence arrives through secure messaging, by fax and as scans: discharge summaries, specialist letters, imaging reports, allied health reports. Documents are filed by reception against the wrong patient occasionally, and each doctor opens a long inbox at the end of a session and reads 14 documents, most of which need no action.

In this example each incoming document is identified by type, matched to a patient with the match shown rather than assumed, and summarised to a few lines that state what the document says and what it is asking for. Anything the match is not confident about is held for a person to assign instead of guessed. The doctor still opens and reads every document that bears on care, and every clinical decision, including whether to recall the patient, remains theirs. What changes is that the reading is in a sensible order and the filing is right. Illustrative example, not a client story.

Data

Health information, My Health Record and third parties

Health information is the most protected category of personal information in Australian law. It is regulated under the Privacy Act and the Australian Privacy Principles, a breach involving it is very likely notifiable, and patients are entitled to know who handles it. A practice that cannot answer where a transcript of a consultation is stored has a problem, whatever the clinical benefit.

How we set it up: business grade accounts with training on your data switched off and data residency understood before anything starts, each workflow given the narrowest read access that does the job, and no workflow writing into a clinical record. Material sourced from My Health Record is treated under the access rules that already apply to it rather than copied into a general tool. Consent for recording is obtained and recorded, your collection statement is updated to match, and practitioners who want to use something themselves go through the practice rather than around it.

The practice also needs one page that reception, nursing and medical staff can all follow: what may be typed into which tool, what never may, and who to ask. Writing that and training the team is AI training, and in a practice it should land before any tool does.

Starting from $9,999 (AUD, ex GST)

Every job is scoped up front after a Diagnostic. Sam is based in Fortitude Valley, Brisbane, and travel is charged at cost from Brisbane. See the cost guide.

Questions

Common questions from practice principals and practice managers

Are AI scribes allowed in an Australian practice?

Practitioners are using them, and both the regulator and the college have published guidance on doing it properly. The conditions that matter are patient consent, the practitioner reviewing and owning the note, knowing where the recording and the transcript are stored, and your privacy policy reflecting what actually happens. The obligation sits with the practitioner, not the vendor.

Can software pick the MBS item number?

No, and this is one of the firmer lines on the page. The billing practitioner is accountable for what is claimed in their name, and incorrect claiming has consequences that reach well past a repayment. A workflow can surface the consultation record and flag an inconsistency for a person to look at. Choosing the item is clinical and administrative judgement combined.

Our results and correspondence backlog is the real problem. Can it help?

Partly, and carefully. Incoming correspondence can be identified, filed against the right patient and summarised so a doctor reads a shorter document. What it cannot do is decide clinical urgency or triage a result. The sorting is administrative. The reading stays with the practitioner.

Will this interfere with accreditation?

Handled properly it tends to help, because accreditation rewards documented, consistent process and that is exactly what these workflows produce. What would cause a problem is an undocumented tool handling patient information with nobody able to explain where the data went. So the documentation is part of the build.

Can it answer the phone?

It can take a message, identify what the caller needs and prepare the callback for reception, which is useful at 8.30am when every line rings at once. It does not assess whether a caller needs to be seen today. Any mention of chest pain, breathing, bleeding or a baby goes straight to a person, and the design assumes that case rather than the easy one.

We are a specialist practice, not general practice. Does this apply?

Mostly, with different priorities. Specialist practices run on referrals in and letters out, so the first workflows are usually referral triage and the correspondence back to the referring doctor. The surgical side adds theatre lists, informed financial consent and health fund paperwork, all of which is document handling.

Talk it through with Sam

Book a 30 minute discovery call about how your business runs today.

Book a discovery call