What software do GP practices use in Australia?

Most Australian general practices run one of four clinical systems, Best Practice, MedicalDirector, Zedmed or Genie, alongside HotDoc or AutoMed bookings, Tyro or HICAPS payments, Medicare billing, pathology downloads, secure messaging such as HealthLink, and Microsoft 365. Each layer matters, but the connections between them matter more, because that is where practices break.

The clinical system, often called practice management software, is the centre of the practice. It holds the appointment book, patient records, consult notes, prescriptions, recalls, care plans and billing. It is also where recalls and reminders originate, which makes it a clinical safety system, not just an admin tool. Best Practice and MedicalDirector dominate general practice; Zedmed and Genie are common in particular clinic types and specialist rooms; allied health businesses often run Cliniko or Pracsuite instead. When this system is down, the practice is down.

Around it sits the patient-facing layer. HotDoc and AutoMed handle online bookings, appointment reminders, recalls and digital check-in; HealthEngine adds directory listings and bookings. For many patients the booking app effectively is the practice, and when it disconnects from the appointment book, double-bookings appear and trust erodes fast. These tools have to stay correctly wired into the clinical system to earn their keep.

Then there is the money layer. Consultations are billed to Medicare or DVA directly from the clinical system, private fees go through a Tyro or HICAPS terminal that talks to the same software, and gap payments happen at the desk. Medicare rejections and reconciliation live here too, which is why billing staff usually feel software faults first. When the terminal and the clinical system stop talking, staff fall back to manual receipting and every patient checkout slows to a crawl.

The results and messaging layer is the least visible and the most clinical. Downloaders fetch pathology and imaging results from laboratories such as SA Pathology and Healius and file them against patient records. Secure messaging services, HealthLink, Medical Objects and Halo Connect among them, carry referrals, specialist letters and discharge summaries between providers. This plumbing carries real clinical risk when it fails, because a result that never arrives is a result nobody actions. Keeping the feeds registered correctly when anything changes, a new doctor, a new provider number, a new laboratory, is fiddly, invisible work that has to be done right.

A newer layer is arriving quickly: AI. Consult-room scribes such as Lyrebird Health draft notes from the conversation, and Microsoft Copilot is appearing across practice admin. These tools can save real time, but they touch patient data, so practices adopting them well treat them like any other clinical integration: decide who can use them, on which devices, with what patient consent wording, before the first consult is recorded.

Holding it all together is the general business layer: Microsoft 365 for email, calendars and documents, Entra ID managing who can log in to what, and Intune managing the practice's computers and devices. This is also where security lives, and in a practice it is inseparable from the clinical stack, because the same identity that opens email opens patient records. Printers, scanners and label printers belong here too; scripts, referrals and pathology labels still come out of them every hour of a clinic day, and a consult room with a dead printer interrupts every single appointment.

The stack also ages in place. Clinical software releases updates that must be tested and applied out of hours; Windows versions fall out of support; integrations change when vendors change their sides; and occasionally a product you depend on reaches end of life entirely. A practice that only touches its systems when something breaks is quietly accumulating risk, because in this stack, out of date and insecure are the same thing.

Notice that every layer connects to the clinical system, and each connection is a point where the stack can silently break. The classic example is a password change at the front desk that quietly stops a downloader: nothing errors, nothing alerts, and three days of results sit at the lab until someone asks why the inbox is empty. The practical question for a practice owner is rarely which product to buy; it is who keeps the whole stack talking to itself, watches it, and takes ownership when two vendors each insist their piece is fine.

That is the job we have been doing since 2006 as an Adelaide-based provider with medical practices as a speciality. There is no universally right stack, and switching systems carries real costs in data migration and retraining, so be sceptical of anyone who leads with a rip-and-replace. If you want a second opinion on yours, call 1800 456 567 and bring your software list; ten minutes with it usually shows where the fragile joints are. Our free Essential Eight Cyber Security Scorecard is another easy place to start.