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

Cliniko is one of the most trusted practice management systems in Australian allied health, and for good reason: it is clean, reliable, and it rarely gets in your way. Most clinics that look elsewhere are not unhappy with Cliniko — they have simply outgrown the pile of add-ons sitting around it.

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.