What IT does a new GP clinic need before opening day?

Before opening day, a new GP clinic needs working clinical software, Medicare and payment integrations, pathology downloads, secure messaging, phones, internet, backups and security, all tested with rehearsal bookings before the first patient arrives. The most common mistake is ordering the IT last, after the fit-out, when cheap problems have already become expensive ones.

Opening your own practice is one of the few moments you get to choose everything, and that control is worth more than it looks: no inherited server in a storeroom, no undocumented passwords, no legacy decisions made by someone who left years ago. The blank slate is the asset, and the plan below is how to spend it. Every shortcut taken now becomes someone's cleanup job later; every good decision compounds quietly for a decade.

Start with the physical layer, because it is the least forgiving on timing. Network cabling must go in before the walls close, so it belongs in the fit-out drawings; the cheapest week to run a cable is the one before the plaster. Internet at a new address can take weeks to provision, and a clinic should also have a backup connection, because Medicare billing, results and bookings all stop without one. Add business-grade Wi-Fi with the clinical network kept separate from anything guests touch, phones, and a computer, screen and printer in each consult room.

Then the clinical stack. Choose the practice management software first, since everything else wires into it, then register the integrations around it: Medicare and DVA billing, a Tyro or HICAPS terminal, online bookings through HotDoc or AutoMed, pathology downloads from the laboratories you will use, and secure messaging such as HealthLink or Medical Objects for referrals and specialist letters. Each registration has its own paperwork and its own lead time, which is why this list, not the furniture, sets your critical path. Start the Medicare and terminal registrations as soon as the business entity exists, not the week before opening.

Build security in from day one, because it is a design decision now and a retrofit project later. Microsoft 365 with Entra ID gives every staff member one identity, multi-factor authentication should be on from the first login, Intune should manage every device before it touches patient data, and backups must exist and be tested before there is anything irreplaceable to lose. Starting this way also sets the culture: a team that begins with MFA never has to be talked into it. The Essential Eight works far better as a design specification for a new clinic than as an audit response two years in, and it makes RACGP accreditation preparation markedly easier when that time comes.

People need setting up too, before their first shift rather than during it. Every staff member needs an account, the right permissions in the clinical software, multi-factor authentication enrolled on their own device, and an hour of training on the systems they will use with patients in the room. A receptionist learning the booking workflow live, with a queue forming, is a failure of planning, not of the receptionist.

In the final week before opening, rehearse. Create test patients and run the full loop: book online, check in, consult, prescribe, bill Medicare, take a card payment, receive a pathology result, send a referral. Then run the same loop from a doctor's login, because permissions problems hide from administrators. Invite the whole team and let them break things; they will find workflow gaps no technician can. Every failure found in rehearsal is a quiet fix; the same failure on opening morning is a queue of real patients. A boring opening day is the entire goal.

An honest note on where not to spend: most new clinics should not buy a server, and few need enterprise-grade kit on day one. Cloud-hosted clinical software avoids creating a single point of failure in a storeroom, and equipment can scale as the patient list does. The same discipline applies to software: start with the integrations patients will feel on day one and add the rest once the clinic is breathing. Spend where failure hurts, on the internet connection, the backups and the security, rather than on extras a five-room clinic will not notice.

We are Adelaide-based, at Level 2, 25 Grenfell Street, and we have been building and supporting business IT in South Australia since 2006, with medical practices a speciality. If you are planning a clinic, the cheapest phone call you will make is the one before the fit-out contract is signed, and we will happily read the plans alongside you: 1800 456 567.