If you spend enough time looking at practice management software (PMS), a pattern emerges: everyone hates their current system but switching is too painful. The incumbents built their products for a pre-AI world, leading to manual data-entry workflows that burn out practitioners and deliver suboptimal patient care.
The emergence of powerful LLMs creates an opportunity to reimagine the entire PMS stack. In Australia, there are 130,000 allied health practitioners and 28,000 GPs managing over 170M patient visits annually.
An AI-native PMS in primary care and allied health needs to nail three things:
1. Get the Patient Experience Right
The core of any successful healthcare business is patient engagement. Current PMS systems treat patients as database entries. An AI-native system should treat them as people on a healthcare journey:
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Embedded LLMs that understand a patient’s complete medical context and can:
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Deliver personalised coaching between visits
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Send smart reminders that explain the “why”, not just the “what”
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Provide condition-specific support, such as diabetes management, physiotherapy rehab tracking, and mental health check-ins
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Wearables integration for real-time monitoring
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Multilingual support that adapts to literacy levels
2. Make Practitioners More Effective
The goal isn’t to replace clinical judgment. It’s to eliminate the administrative burden that keeps practitioners from using their judgment effectively:
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LLM-assisted documentation:
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Speech-to-text that understands medical terminology
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Auto-generated SOAP notes that learn your style
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Automated referral letter creation
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Templates that adapt, specific to each specialty
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Clinical decision support:
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Suggestions for evidence-based protocols
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Risk stratification for patient populations
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Intelligent specialist referral recommendations
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Medical Scribe tools that integrate with existing PMS and EHRs have taken off in the last two years, and there’s clear PMF for clinicians saving hours daily.
3. Run the Business Better
Even perfect clinical care means nothing if the practice can’t operate profitably. Modern practices need:
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Automated front office:
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Voice-powered scheduling and FAQ handling
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Smart waitlist management
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Multilingual patient communication
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Integrated financial operations:
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Medicare/private health coding and billing
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NDIS claiming (in Australia)
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Xero integration for Accounting
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Analytics:
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Revenue forecasting
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Patient outcome tracking
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Resource optimisation
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The Path to Scale
Getting GTM working will be tough. PMS systems are valuable for a reason; they’re very sticky.
The winner will have to build a simple data extraction method to pull data from the existing PMS and enter it into the new one in a simple process that takes hours. This will likely involve some version of “computer use” to scrape the data where open APIs aren’t available.
It will need thorough checks to ensure accurate data extraction and correct mapping to the new product’s data infrastructure to avoid losing patient data.
I expect you’d need to start by targeting new practices or PE-owned groups with a clear mandate to reduce costs.
I’d love to hear your thoughts on this opportunity, what won’t work, and how to get the GTM working both locally and globally (with localisation). Please reply!