What RACGP accreditation expects from your practice IT

The RACGP Standards for general practices (5th edition) expect a practice to keep patient information secure and available — which makes practice IT an accreditation topic, not just an operations one. In practical terms, assessors expect documented information security: controlled access to clinical systems, multi-factor authentication, current patching, tested backups and a business continuity plan.

Start with access. Every team member should sign into the clinical system — Best Practice, MedicalDirector, Zedmed or otherwise — with their own account, with access matched to their role and removed promptly when they leave. Shared logins make it impossible to show who accessed a record, which is exactly the question you don't want to be unable to answer.

Multi-factor authentication comes next, and it matters most wherever the practice can be reached from outside — remote access for after-hours recordkeeping, email, and any cloud services. A stolen password on its own should never be enough to reach patient information.

Patching and maintenance are quiet requirements with loud consequences. Unsupported operating systems and unpatched software are the most common way attackers get into small practices, and 'the server has been fine for years' is not evidence of security — it's usually evidence of ageing infrastructure nobody wants to touch.

Backups deserve special scrutiny, because the Standards' real concern is continuity of care. A backup that has never been test-restored is a hope, not a control. Assessors respond well to a simple statement few practices can make: backups run automatically, they're kept where ransomware can't reach them, and we restored from them successfully on this date.

Then there's the paperwork layer: a written business continuity plan for when systems are unavailable, and privacy processes covering your Privacy Act obligations and the My Health Record breach-notification rules. If a notifiable incident happened tomorrow, who does what, in what order?

None of this needs to be assembled by the practice manager the week before assessment. Otaris builds Adelaide practice IT to support the RACGP Standards and maintains the documentation continuously — so accreditation evidence is a printout, not a project. The free Essential Eight Cyber Security Scorecard is the natural starting point: it shows exactly where your practice stands and what to fix first.