For allied health practices
Allied health software for Melbourne practices paying clinician rates for admin time.
For 5-30 staff physiotherapy, psychology, speech pathology, occupational therapy, podiatry and chiropractic practices where Cliniko or Halaxy holds the appointment book, HICAPS holds the billing, NDIS plan-management lives in inboxes and AHPRA CPD evidence is reconstructed every renewal cycle. We build the database underneath the practice, so the practice management system, the billing rails and the compliance trail all read from one source instead of four.
What we hear from practice owners and managers
Practice owners describe the same pattern at every Melbourne allied health practice we sit down with. None of it is Cliniko's fault on its own, or Halaxy's, or HICAPS's. It is what happens when each system owns its own view of the patient and nobody owns the view across them.
- You are paying clinician rates for admin time. Notes get caught up after hours. Rosters get rebuilt by hand each fortnight in a spreadsheet that someone exports from the practice management system. New patients get onboarded by re-keying details from the GP referral into Cliniko or Halaxy. The reason you hired clinicians was to see patients; instead a third of the week goes to feeding the systems that were meant to remove the admin.
- Multi-site reporting is rebuilt every quarter from scratch. Two clinics, three clinics, a satellite room one day a week. Each location runs its own appointment book, its own outcome measures, its own waitlist. Quarter-end means somebody pulls four CSVs out of Cliniko or Nookal, normalises them in Excel, joins them against the billing export, and the practice owner reads numbers a fortnight after the quarter actually closed. This is the same shape we automated for a health provider whose regulatory returns ran on overnight spreadsheets: see the regulatory reporting automation case study.
- Referrer relationships and NDIS plan admin live in inboxes. GP referrals come in by fax, email and HealthLink and get triaged in someone's inbox. NDIS plan-management coordinators email back and forth about service agreements, plan reviews and budget remaining per support category. The relationship is real. The data trail is a thread none of the practice management systems can search across.
- AHPRA CPD evidence sits in seven places. Course certificates in inboxes. Supervision logs in a Word document. Reflective practice notes in a clinician's personal file. Conference attendance in the calendar. The renewal deadline arrives, and either the practice manager spends a week reconstructing the evidence or each clinician scrambles alone. AHPRA expects one record.
- Billing flows between HICAPS, Tyro, Medicare and Xero leak revenue. Same-day claiming via HICAPS or Tyro at the front desk. Medicare Online for the Better Access and CDM items. Plan-managed NDIS invoices going out separately to the plan manager. Self-managed NDIS invoices going to the participant. Reconciling all of that against the Xero ledger is a fortnightly job that finds something each time. Some of what it finds is a missed item that nobody re-billed.
None of these get fixed by switching practice management systems. They get fixed by deciding which system owns which field and putting a real database underneath that captures the truth across Cliniko, Halaxy, the billing rails and the compliance trail. See how we approach the integration side when the Cliniko, Halaxy or Nookal stack already exists, or browse our full custom-software services for the broader picture. When AHPRA CPD evidence is the load-bearing piece, the work sits closer to custom LMS development than to a practice-management bolt-on.
Tools we work with
Practice management
Cliniko, Halaxy, Nookal, PracticeHub
The system the front desk and clinicians actually open every day. We integrate it as the appointment, episode and clinical-notes spine without trying to replace it. The bits the practice management system does not natively show (multi-site capacity, referrer pipeline, NDIS plan budget tracking, AHPRA CPD across the team) live in the database underneath.
Billing rails
HICAPS, Tyro, Medicare Online
Same-day claiming and Medicare item submission. We build the integration layer that reconciles the HICAPS or Tyro terminal against the practice management system, lifts Medicare Online responses back into the patient record, and tracks the items that bounced so the front desk does not have to remember to re-bill them.
NDIS plan tracking
Service agreements, plan-managed claims, self-managed invoicing
NDIS administration without a separate spreadsheet per participant. Service agreement status, plan budget remaining by support category, plan-manager invoicing splits, and the audit trail the next plan review will ask about. We model it in the database alongside the clinical episode, so the same patient is not stored three different ways.
Outcome measures and reporting
The dashboard the practice owner will actually open
Multi-site capacity, clinician utilisation, referrer mix by source, NDIS plan budget burn, outcome-measure trends across episodes. Built into the leadership meeting agenda so the conversation runs on numbers rather than memory. The outcome-measure side specifically: the practice management system collects them; we build the reporting layer that compares them across episodes, sites and clinicians without somebody exporting CSVs.
Accounting and payroll
Xero, KeyPay, Employment Hero
The ledger and the payroll system already know what they need to know. We build the integration that lifts billing out of Cliniko or Halaxy into Xero correctly the first time, and feeds clinician hours from the roster into KeyPay or Employment Hero without somebody re-entering them. Award interpretation for the Health Professionals and Support Services Award lives in one place rather than three spreadsheets.
The plumbing
The custom layer
Most of the value sits in what your practice has always done in the practice owner's head, in shared drives, or in a spreadsheet someone built years ago. Patient, episode, referrer, plan, clinician, site, AHPRA CPD record, partner-of-record handoff: the entities the practice management system does not natively model in the shape your practice runs them. We model them explicitly in the database so the practice runs the same way on the day a senior clinician takes leave.
Adjacent proof / regulated education provider
Regulator-shaped CPD is a database problem, not an LMS feature.
We have not yet shipped a publicly-named allied health case study. The closest pattern from our recent work is a regulated education provider whose CPD compliance, fragmented student data and manual marking sat across three systems before we rebuilt the data layer underneath. Different regulator, different cohort, same shape: the rule lived in a person's head, the evidence lived in seven places, and the renewal deadline arrived the same way every year. Read the LMS rebuild case study for the longer write-up of the adjacent pattern.
Why this pattern shows up in allied health too: AHPRA CPD evidence behaves like regulated CPD evidence in any other industry. The hours count differently to CPA Australia, the categories matter, the audit trail is the thing that gets asked for. The hospitals page covers the public-health side of clinical data when the practice is large enough to face state collections, and VINAH Manager is the productised version of that non-admitted state-reporting work. The underlying database-first answer is the same as the one we apply for accounting and wealth firms in this set.
The engagement path
Discovery call
30 minutes with Marty (founder, doing this since 2007). You describe the practice, the systems, the bits that actually hurt. We tell you honestly whether what you are describing sounds like an integration job, a custom-software job, or a sharper Cliniko or Halaxy setup that would solve more for less. Allied health practices have their own procurement story (private, owner-operated, often growing through acquisition). If your practice runs an approved-vendor list or a network agreement, tell us upfront. No pitch.
Systems diagnostic
A fixed-price piece of work. Most practice managers we meet have been burned by an IT project that stalled in a privacy review or an AHPRA-adjacent compliance question, so the diagnostic exists to put a real number and the data-handling story on the table together. We map where each piece of clinical, billing and consent data lives, who edits it, where it is hosted, who has access, and which fields actually matter for AHPRA evidence, NDIS audits and the practice owner dashboard. You finish with a written diagnostic you can forward to a privacy officer or AHPRA-registered principal, a prioritised list of fixes and a scoped estimate.
Integration or custom build
Most allied health practices need both. The integration layer puts Cliniko or Halaxy, the HICAPS or Tyro terminal, Medicare Online and Xero on speaking terms via a real database. The custom build models the work that does not fit any of those tools: multi-site reporting, NDIS plan tracking, AHPRA CPD evidence, the referrer pipeline. We build them in stages so the practice sees value inside the first quarter, and clinicians see something that gives them clinical time back.
Ongoing support
We do not build and walk away. Vendors change APIs, NDIS pricing arrangements change, AHPRA standards update, your practice opens another site. We stay on as a small ongoing engagement, usually a few hours a month, so the system gets fixed when it breaks and grows when the practice grows. The same person who built it picks up the phone.
We have been running this engagement model since 2007. See how we work.
Not sure if your practice needs custom software or a sharper Cliniko setup?
Start with a 30-minute discovery call. We will tell you honestly. Most Melbourne allied health practices we talk to are one good integration away from giving clinicians their clinical time back. And if the diagnostic finds nothing worth fixing, you walk away with a clean bill of health for your systems.