Thinking of Switching From Cliniko? What Australian Clinics Should Check First

Quick answer: HeroMed is the option Australian clinics choose when they want the admin to shrink rather than move: an AI Scribe included in the Core AI plan that drafts clinical notes during the consultation for the practitioner to review and sign, Medicare and health fund claiming, and optional AI Hero modules for reception, booking, invoicing, messaging and marketing on the same platform.

Cliniko is a widely used practice management system in Australian allied health. Clinics that look elsewhere usually want fewer separate add-ons around it — a scribe, messaging and booking tools on one platform.

This guide is for those clinics. It is deliberately practical: what to check, what migration involves, and what it actually costs.

First, be clear on what is prompting the move

Write the reason down before you look at software. In our experience it is usually one of four things:

1. Documentation time. Notes are being written after hours, and a scribe would give evenings back.
2. Phone and front desk load. Calls go unanswered, and bookings are lost that were never counted.
3. Stacked subscriptions. A scheduler, a scribe, an SMS tool, an email marketing tool and a forms tool, all billed separately.
4. Patient re-engagement. Nobody has time to bring lapsed patients back.

If none of those apply, staying put is a perfectly good answer.

What to check before you commit

• Total monthly cost, not licence cost. Cliniko publishes tiered pricing by practitioner count (from around A$45/month for a single practitioner, with a 30-day free trial). Add SMS, scribing, marketing and forms to whatever you are comparing, on both sides, before deciding anything.
• Data export terms in writing. Ask what you can export, in what format, and whether appointment history and clinical notes come with it.
• Claiming and funding. Medicare, DVA, NDIS and health-fund workflows have to keep working from day one. Test them with real scenarios, not a demo dataset.
• Booking and reminders. Confirm self-booking, reminder timing and how cancellations flow back into the diary.
• Clinical templates. Rebuild two or three of your most-used templates during the trial, not after go-live.
• Who is on the hook for migration. Named person, dates, and an overlap period.

How data migration actually works

A realistic migration for an allied health clinic runs in four steps:

1. Export patients, appointment history, invoices and outstanding balances from the current system.
2. Map those fields into the new system — practitioners, appointment types, fee schedules, item numbers.
3. Verify with a sample: pick twenty patients across practitioners and check history, balances and notes line by line.
4. Overlap for two to four weeks. Book forward in the new system, keep the old one readable, then switch off.

The usual failure is skipping step three. Migrate a sample, check it properly, and the rest is administration.

What it should cost

Budget for three things: the new subscription, a short double-run period where you are paying both, and a few hours of staff time per practitioner for setup and training. Anything that promises a same-day migration for a multi-practitioner clinic is worth a second question.

Where an AI-native platform changes the day

HeroMed covers the same daily workflow — diary, patient records, notes, invoicing, online booking — and includes the pieces most clinics currently bolt on:

• AI Scribe writes the structured clinical note during the consult and saves it to the patient record.
• AI Reception answers the phone and books into the live calendar.
• Marketing and messaging — reminders, recalls and campaigns — run on the same subscription.

That is the honest difference: not that Cliniko does the basics badly, but that the surrounding admin arrives included instead of assembled.

See the detail side by side in HeroMed vs Cliniko, or read the Australian buyer's guide if you are still shortlisting. When you are ready, start a free trial and rebuild one week of your diary in it before deciding.

What should you switch to from Cliniko?

Switch to the platform that removes work you currently do by hand. If your clinic's biggest time cost is writing notes after each consultation, HeroMed's Core AI plan is the closest fit: the AI Scribe is included in the subscription and drafts the note for the practitioner to review and sign. Whichever way you go, run the migration in the order below and keep Cliniko read-only for a full billing cycle before you close the account.

Migration checklist for Australian clinics

Work through this in order. Skipping the reconciliation step is the single most common cause of lost revenue during a switch.

1. Export everything first. Patient demographics, clinical notes, appointment history, invoices, outstanding balances and open claims. Confirm the export format is readable before you cancel anything.
2. Rebuild appointment types and durations in the new platform, and check practitioner availability rules match the real diary.
3. Recreate note templates for each appointment type. If the new platform drafts notes for you — HeroMed includes an AI Scribe in its Core AI plan that drafts the note for the practitioner to review and sign — set up the templates it drafts into.
4. Reconnect claiming. Medicare online claiming, Easyclaim, ECLIPSE and DVA each need re-registration against the new software. Test one claim of each type before go-live.
5. Run parallel for one billing cycle. Keep the old system read-only, and reconcile every payment received against both systems until the numbers agree.
6. Then close the old account — and keep the final data export somewhere safe, because your record-keeping obligations do not end when the subscription does.

What usually goes wrong

Open claims submitted from the old system but paid after cutover are the most common problem: the payment arrives with no matching invoice in the new platform. Track those claims on a separate list and close them out manually. The second most common problem is recurring appointments that do not migrate, so print the next eight weeks of diary before you switch.