Almost every Australian general practice already runs on practice management software. Best Practice (Bp Premier) alone covers a large share of the market, and most clinics layer on a handful of additional tools for bookings, billing, or communication. So it’s worth asking a slightly uncomfortable question: if a clinic already has practice management software, why does the same conversation about overdue patients and missed reviews keep coming up?
The honest answer is that most practice management software is very good at one thing and only adequate at another. It’s built to store and organise patient data reliably. It’s rarely built to act on that data without a person driving every step.
At its core, practice management software exists to record what happened: appointments booked, results received, plans created, notes taken. This is the foundational layer every clinic needs, and it’s genuinely well-solved by the major platforms in the Australian market.
What it typically doesn’t do on its own is decide who needs contacting today, reach out to them, and track what happened next. That layer, turning stored data into action, is usually left to the practice team, working through reports and lists manually.
Put together, the picture is straightforward: fewer GPs, working slightly fewer hours each, trying to meet demand from a population that’s both growing and ageing. None of these trends reverse on their own within the next two decades.
This distinction sounds abstract until you look at what it means practically. A practice management system can tell you, on request, which patients are overdue for a chronic disease review. It generally can’t tell you, without someone running that report regularly, which of those patients have already been contacted this month, which haven’t responded, and which need a phone call rather than another SMS.
The result is a familiar pattern: the data needed to manage follow-up exists somewhere in the system, but turning it into consistent action depends on staff time that’s already stretched across reception, billing, and everything else a clinic runs on any given day.
A tightening GP supply removes that slack. Every consultation hour becomes a scarcer resource, which means the cost of using it inefficiently rises. A slot spent on a patient who didn’t strictly need to be seen that week is a slot that wasn’t available for a patient whose need was more pressing and with fewer GP hours overall, there’s less room to simply add more capacity to compensate.
Two things have changed the stakes on this gap. First, workforce pressure, Australia is projected to face a shortfall of nearly 9,000 full-time GPs by 2048, meaning fewer consultation hours to work with and less room to absorb inefficient use of the ones available. Second, regulatory change, the MyMedicare GP Chronic Condition Management Plan framework introduced in 2025 ties chronic disease review timing directly to patient access, not just practice billing, making manual tracking a higher-stakes exercise than it used to be.
Both trends point the same direction: the gap between storing patient data and acting on it is becoming more expensive to leave unaddressed.
This isn’t an argument for replacing existing practice management software — the core system a clinic already runs on is doing its job. It’s a case for being clear-eyed about what it wasn’t built to do, and evaluating tools specifically for the follow-up layer on their own merits:
Does it connect directly to the practice management system a clinic already uses, rather than requiring manual exports? Does it let a clinic define its own criteria for who counts as overdue or high-risk, rather than applying one generic rule? And does it actually reach out to patients and follow up on non-responses, rather than just generating another list for staff to work through?
Coda isn’t a replacement for Best Practice or any other practice management system, it connects directly to Best Practice and handles specifically the layer that most practice management software leaves to manual staff time. It identifies patients who are overdue or high-risk based on the conditions a clinic defines, reaches out to them automatically, follows up if there’s no response, and hands reception a call list only for the patients still outstanding.
The core software a clinic runs on was never the problem. The question worth asking is what happens after the data shows a patient is overdue and whether that step depends on staff remembering to act, or happens reliably on its own.
The infrastructure layer that turns GP clinics from passive waiters into active carers.
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Made in Australia.
