South Australia-based general practice clinics operator Better Medical has engaged online practice management platform provider PracticeHub by Avant to help enhance its clinical and corporate governance.

WHY IT MATTERS

Established in 2015, Better Medical runs 85 clinics across South Australia, Queensland, Tasmania and Victoria. It employs over 600 general practitioners, seven doctor-owners and more than 900 support staff.

Dr Colin Goodson, chief medical officer at Better Medical, said in a statement that PracticeHub was chosen for its ability to centralise management and oversight of operations. "Its customisable features will provide a framework to ensure quality, consistency, accountability and risk mitigation in practice management across our group," he added.

Another reason was the ability to integrate the PracticeHub platform with Better Medical's requirement for a cloud-based quality management system from Brisbane-based healthcare software company Cgov. The integration enables reporting of work health and safety, clinical, and risk incidents, as well as patient complaints, which the healthcare provider can configure to their specific needs.

"Having a solid governance framework will allow our team to provide seamless management services to our GP clinics, so they can focus on improving the health of the communities they serve," Dr Goodson stated.

THE LARGER TREND

This year, PracticeHub introduced new applications as part of its solution offerings. One of these is an app that alerts healthcare organisations to lapses in their practitioners' registrations with the Australian Health Practitioner Regulation Agency. Launched in May, the Ahpra Alerts app was developed to help reduce the administration burden for practice staff and compliance risks that may arise from registration lapses.

The company has also introduced an app that manages doctors' annual certificates of insurance, helping minimise the medico-legal risks that come with manually collecting those certificates.