For Australian general practices running Best Practice (Bp Premier)

Best Practice Software Integration and Automation for Australian General Practice

Best Practice runs the clinical and business side of general practices right across Australia, and it does that job well. What it cannot do is answer the fourteenth call of the morning asking whether the doctor is running late, chase the patient whose cervical screening recall lapsed eleven months ago, retype a new patient form that arrived half filled in, or notice that a bulk bill claim quietly rejected three weeks back. That work still lands on reception. Yes AI builds the automation that sits around Best Practice and takes it off them.

We work with what Best Practice actually allows. Your clinical data stays in your Bp database on your practice server or hosted environment, we connect only through interfaces Best Practice Software supports and the structured clinical messaging your practice already uses, and every clinical judgement stays with your clinicians. Built for the Privacy Act, the Australian Privacy Principles, state health records law and the way an Australian practice really runs a day.

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Realistic ROI

Hours/week

Front desk time returned

The repeat calls about opening hours, appointment times, results being back and where a referral went stop reaching a human at all

Fewer DNAs

Empty chairs recovered

Confirmations, reminders and a same-day follow up on every did-not-attend run whether or not anyone remembers to run them

Less rework

Intake arrives clean

New patient details, Medicare and concession card numbers and consent come in before arrival, instead of being retyped off a clipboard at a full waiting room

2 to 6 weeks

From scope to live

Most practices go live inside a fixed, agreed timeframe once we have confirmed in writing which Best Practice interfaces are available to you

Why Automate Around Best Practice With Yes AI

Bp Premier is a clinical system first. Its data sits in a SQL database on the practice server or hosted infrastructure, access is controlled per user and audited, and Best Practice Software decides what third parties may connect to and how. That is exactly as it should be for a system holding patient health information, and it is also why so much practice admin never gets automated: most vendors either promise something Bp will not sanction, or give up and sell you another portal for reception to check. We work inside the rules and automate everything around them.

We map your Bp setup, not a generic clinic

Two practices on the same Bp release run nothing alike. Appointment types, session templates and provider columns are set up differently, recall reasons drift over the years until there are four spellings of the same thing, the inbox routing rules reflect whoever configured them in 2019, and half the practice has a workaround nobody has written down. Before we design anything we sit with the practice manager and reception, walk the day from first call to last claim, and map which parts of it Bp already handles, which parts a person is holding together, and which parts nobody currently owns.

We automate around the clinical record, never through it

Nothing we build writes into a patient's clinical notes, prescribes, codes a diagnosis or alters a result. The automation works on the admin layer: the phone, the appointment enquiry, the form a patient fills in before arrival, the reminder that has to go out, the correspondence that has been sitting unactioned, the claim that failed. Where information does need to reach the record, it reaches it as a structured message or a task for a human to check and accept, exactly the way your pathology results already arrive. That boundary is deliberate, and we do not move it because a project would be quicker if we did.

Health information carries the highest bar and we treat it that way

Patient data is sensitive information under the Privacy Act and the Australian Privacy Principles, and your state law sits on top of that, such as the Health Records Act 2001 in Victoria or the Health Records and Information Privacy Act 2002 in New South Wales. We design to that from the first workshop: least-privilege access, encrypted connections, only the fields that genuinely need to move actually moving, verified hosting and processing locations, deliberate decisions about retention and deletion, and a written record of what flows where so your practice can answer for it at accreditation or if a patient ever asks.

One Australian team scopes it, builds it and stays

The same people who sat in your practice do the build, the testing and the support. That matters with Bp, because major releases and service packs land on a schedule you do not control, your practice IT provider owns the server and the backup regime, and a change window has to fit around a clinic that is open. We coordinate with your IT provider rather than talking past them, and when Bp updates or you switch on something new, the people who built the automation are the people who adjust it.

What We Build Around Best Practice

Six areas of practice admin that eat reception hours and that can be automated without going anywhere near clinical decision making. Every one of them runs alongside Bp Premier rather than replacing any part of it, and every one of them hands off to a human the moment it should.

Front desk relief

The phone answered on every ring

A voice agent answers overflow, after hours and the calls reception cannot get to, and handles the ones that do not need a person: opening hours, address and parking, whether the doctor is running behind, what to bring, fees and whether a doctor bulk bills, appointment availability and enquiries, and taking a callback request with the details reception actually needs. Anything clinical, distressed or ambiguous goes straight to a human, and anything urgent gets the standard advice to call 000 or attend an emergency department. Every call leaves a written summary so nothing depends on a sticky note.

Nothing lapses

Recalls and reminders that genuinely go out

Recalls are where practices lose both continuity of care and revenue, because the list is long, the follow up is manual and it is always the first thing dropped on a busy week. We automate the outbound cycle around your recall and reminder data: the first contact, the second attempt on a different channel, the escalation to a call, and the clean list of who still has not responded and needs a person. Contact preferences and opt outs are honoured, and the clinically driven decision about what a patient is recalled for stays exactly where it is, with the clinician who set it.

Clean data

New patient intake before they walk in

New patients get a link instead of a clipboard. Demographics, contact details, Medicare, DVA, pension and concession card details, next of kin, regular medications and allergies, consent, and your privacy collection statement are captured properly, with validation on the fields that are always wrong on paper, so a card number is checked at the point of entry rather than at the point of a rejected claim. The completed record arrives structured and legible for reception to check and accept into Bp, which turns a ten minute retype into a fifteen second review.

Nothing lost

Correspondence and results workflow tracking

Pathology, imaging, discharge summaries, specialist letters and referral acknowledgements arrive through your secure messaging channels, and the risk is never that they do not arrive, it is that one sits unactioned while everyone assumes someone else has it. The automation tracks the administrative state of that queue: what came in, who it belongs to, what has been marked as actioned, what has been sitting too long, and what a patient has already been contacted about. It sorts and chases the workflow. It does not read a result and decide it is normal, and it never tells a patient what a result means.

Chairs refilled

Did not attend and reactivation follow up

A no-show costs twice, once in the empty chair on the day and once in the patient who quietly never rebooks. We automate confirmation the day before, an early cancellation path that offers the slot to your waitlist rather than leaving it empty, and a same-day follow up on every did-not-attend with an easy way to rebook. Where your policy applies a non-attendance fee, the admin around it is handled consistently rather than at whoever is on the desk. Patients who have quietly fallen out of the practice can be worked as a list rather than remembered by accident.

Cash and clarity

Billing, Medicare admin and the practice manager report

Rejected and unprocessed claims are the classic silent leak, because the reason code comes back into a screen nobody opens daily and the amount is small enough to ignore individually. The automation surfaces the exceptions the day they happen, chases outstanding private accounts on a schedule with a proper trail, and flags the visits that were never billed at all. On top of that sits the weekly practice report the practice manager currently builds by hand: appointment utilisation by provider and session, DNA rate, recall completion, billing mix and outstanding claims, delivered without anyone exporting anything.

Six Australian General Practice Plays We Build

Task	Traditional	With Yes AI and Best Practice	Notes
Four-doctor suburban practice with two on reception and a phone that never stops	Calls ring out at peak, voicemail fills, patients in the waiting room wait while reception is on hold	Overflow and after-hours calls answered instantly, routine enquiries resolved, the rest summarised for callback	Reception gets the front counter back. The written call summary means the callback is made by whoever is free, not only by the person who took it.
Practice sitting on a long overdue recall list nobody has time to work	A staff member works the list when the week allows, which is rarely, and the oldest entries are years old	A multi-step outbound cycle runs every week, with a clean escalation list of who still needs a human call	The clinician still decides who is recalled and for what. The automation only handles the contacting, the retries and the record of who has responded.
High new patient volume near a growth corridor, paper forms at the front desk	Clipboard on arrival, then reception retypes it, and half the Medicare numbers are wrong or unreadable	Pre-arrival digital intake with validated card and contact fields, reviewed and accepted in seconds	Fewer rejected claims, a shorter check-in, and the consult starts on time because the demographics are already sorted.
Results and letters piling up in the inbox across several part-time doctors	Items sit unactioned when a doctor is on leave and nobody has a view of the backlog	Daily visibility of what is unactioned, how long it has waited and who is covering, with reminders that escalate	Strictly an administrative safety net around the existing workflow. No result is interpreted, categorised clinically or communicated to a patient by the automation.
Practice losing a session a week to non-attendance	A single SMS reminder goes out, cancellations arrive too late to fill, no-shows are never followed up	Confirmation, early cancellation offered to the waitlist, and same-day rebooking contact after every DNA	Refilled slots and DNA rate are among the easiest numbers for a practice manager to track month on month, and the patient who forgot gets a second chance rather than drifting off the books.
Practice manager building the weekly numbers by hand every Monday	Reports exported and pasted into a spreadsheet, rejected claims found weeks later at reconciliation	A scheduled practice report on utilisation, DNAs, recalls and billing, plus same-day alerts on claim exceptions	The practice manager stops assembling numbers and starts acting on them, and small claiming problems get fixed while they are still easy to fix.

Six Realities of Automating Around a Clinical System

The clinical record is not ours to write to

This is the line we will not cross, and you should be suspicious of anyone who offers to. Our automation does not write clinical notes, does not add or change a diagnosis, does not touch prescribing, and does not mark a result as seen on a clinician's behalf. Information that belongs in the record reaches it the same way pathology already does, as a structured message or a task a human reviews and accepts. If a proposal you are considering involves software silently updating patient notes, ask who is accountable when it is wrong, because it will not be the software.

Supported interfaces only, never a back door into the database

Bp Premier keeps its data in a SQL database on your infrastructure, and it is technically possible for someone to point a tool straight at it. We do not, and we will not. Unsanctioned database access risks your data integrity, your support arrangement with Best Practice Software and, frankly, your accreditation position, and it breaks the moment a version upgrade changes the schema underneath it. We work through the interfaces Best Practice Software supports for partners and through standard clinical messaging. Confirming in writing what is actually available under your licence is step one of every engagement, before we design anything, because the honest answer sometimes shapes the scope. Best Practice and Bp Premier are products of Best Practice Software, and we are an independent Australian consultancy rather than a reseller or agent of theirs.

Privacy Act, the APPs and state health records law

Health information is sensitive information, which carries the highest obligations under the Privacy Act and the Australian Privacy Principles, and state law applies on top, including the Health Records Act 2001 in Victoria and the Health Records and Information Privacy Act 2002 in New South Wales. My Health Record brings its own rules again. In practice that means collecting only what is needed, telling patients what you collect and why, keeping it in Australia, restricting who and what can reach it, meeting the retention periods that apply to you, and being able to show all of this. We design for it up front and document it, rather than treating privacy as paperwork after go live. What we set out here is general information about the obligations that commonly apply to Australian practices, not legal advice, and where a question turns on your specific circumstances we will say so and point you to your own adviser.

AI mishears, and a patient with chest pain is not an admin task

Voice automation is very good at the fiftieth identical question of the day and genuinely bad at the unusual one. Accents, poor mobile reception, an unwell or distressed caller and Australian place names all cause errors. So we build the escape hatches first: clear urgent-symptom handling that directs the caller to 000 or an emergency department, immediate handoff to a human on any clinical, distressed or unclear call, no attempt to give clinical advice or interpret symptoms, and a written record of every call so a person can check what was said. Set the expectation with your team that the agent handles the routine and hands over the rest, because a system that tries to handle everything is the one that eventually handles something badly.

Patient communication consent, channels and fatigue

A patient who gets four automated messages in a fortnight stops reading all of them, including the one that mattered. We honour recorded contact preferences and opt outs, keep to sensible frequency limits and quiet hours, avoid mixing clinical follow up with anything promotional, and keep messages plain about who is contacting them and how to reach a human. Sending marketing off a patient list is a different activity with different rules under the Spam Act, and we will tell you when a message has crossed from a health reminder into a promotion.

On-premises servers, upgrade windows and what happens when it breaks

Most Bp installs run on a practice server or hosted desktop, often maintained by an IT provider who was not in the room when the automation was scoped. That is a real risk: upgrades and service packs land, the server reboots, a connection needs re-authorising, and a clinic cannot simply take a day off while it is sorted. We plan the change windows with your IT provider, test after every Bp update rather than assuming, monitor the connections and alert when one stops rather than waiting for someone to notice, and make sure there is always a plain manual fallback so a busy Monday never depends on the automation being healthy.

How Yes AI Helps

Discovery inside your practice

We spend time with the practice manager, reception and at least one clinician, walk a real day from the first call to the last claim, and count where the hours actually go. You get a written picture of the admin load, what Bp already handles, what people are holding together manually, and which pieces are worth automating first, before anyone commits to a build.

Build on supported ground

We confirm what your Best Practice licence and partner arrangements permit, design to that, and build the phone handling, intake, recall, correspondence tracking, follow up, billing chase and reporting around it. One accountable team, a fixed scope, and a design your practice manager can read and understand rather than a technical document nobody signs off.

Privacy and security by design

Least-privilege access, encrypted connections, verified hosting and processing locations, only the fields that need to move, deliberate retention and deletion, and documentation of every data flow. Written so it stands up at accreditation and so you can answer a patient who asks what happens to their information, rather than a policy PDF nobody has read.

Monitoring, tuning and support after go live

We watch the connections, alert on failures rather than waiting for a complaint, review call transcripts and outcomes in the early weeks, and tune the wording and the routing as your team tells us what is landing badly. When Bp releases an update or your practice changes how it runs sessions, the people who built it adjust it.

Our Best Practice Automation Rollout

A clear five-step path from a first conversation to live, monitored automation running alongside Bp Premier. Most practices are live inside two to six weeks, depending on how many of the admin areas are in scope and how quickly the interface questions with Best Practice Software and your IT provider can be settled.

Discovery in the practice

We sit with the practice manager, reception and a clinician and map the working day: call volume and what those calls are actually about, how appointments and sessions are set up, how recalls are managed today, where correspondence lands, how billing and claiming exceptions are handled, and what the practice manager reports on. We count the hours and agree what a good outcome looks like in numbers you can check later.

Confirm the interfaces and design

We establish in writing what is available to your practice through Best Practice Software's supported partner interfaces and your existing secure messaging, and design only within that. You get a plain-English design covering what is automated, what stays manual, what escalates to a human and when, where data moves and why, and where the clinical boundary sits. Fixed scope, fixed timeframe, signed off before any build starts.

Build in a test environment

We build against a test setup with your IT provider, never straight into the live practice, and prove the connections, the message handling, the intake forms and the call flows there first. Test contact details and test numbers are used so no message can escape to a real patient, and access, logging and failure handling are all in place before anything points at production.

Pilot alongside your current process

We start narrow, usually with after-hours and overflow calls plus one recall type or the new patient intake form, and run it beside the way you work now so reception can see every call summary and every submitted form. You listen to real calls, read real transcripts, and correct the wording and routing before the volume goes up. Nothing widens until the practice is satisfied with what it is seeing.

Go live, train and monitor

We widen the scope, train reception and the practice manager on what now happens automatically, what still needs a person and how to take over a call, and document the fallback for the day something is down. Then we keep watching: connection health, call outcomes, recall response rates and the exceptions, with tuning as the practice grows or Bp updates.

FAQ

Does Yes AI work with Best Practice (Bp Premier)?

Yes. We work with Australian general practices running Best Practice as their clinical and practice management system, and we automate the admin that surrounds it: phone answering and appointment enquiries, recalls and reminders, new patient intake, correspondence and results workflow tracking, non-attendance follow up, billing and Medicare admin chasing, and reporting for the practice manager. We are not asking you to change systems, and we have no interest in moving you off Bp. We make the practice around it run with fewer hands.

Will anything you build write into our patients' clinical notes?

No. That boundary is fixed. Nothing we build writes clinical notes, records or changes a diagnosis, touches prescribing, or marks a result as reviewed on a clinician's behalf. Clinical decision making stays entirely with your clinicians. Where information legitimately needs to reach the record, such as intake details a new patient has provided, it arrives structured for a staff member to check and accept, in the same way results already arrive for a doctor to action. If a vendor offers to have software update patient records directly, ask them who carries the risk when it is wrong.

How do you actually connect to Bp Premier?

Through supported channels only. Bp Premier stores its data in a SQL database on your practice server or hosted infrastructure, with per-user access controls and auditing, and Best Practice Software determines what third parties may connect to and under what agreement. So the first thing we do is establish in writing what is available to your practice, and we design within that, alongside the structured clinical messaging your practice already uses for results and referrals. We do not point tools at the database unsanctioned, because that puts your data integrity, your vendor support and your accreditation position at risk and breaks at the next upgrade.

Is our patient data safe, and what about the Privacy Act?

Health information is sensitive information under the Privacy Act, so it carries the highest obligations under the Australian Privacy Principles, and your state health records law applies on top, such as the Health Records Act 2001 in Victoria or the Health Records and Information Privacy Act 2002 in New South Wales. We design to that from the first workshop: collect only what is needed, verify storage and processing regions, check encryption in transit and at rest, restrict access to the minimum, handle retention and deletion deliberately, and document every data flow so the practice can evidence it at accreditation or answer a patient who asks. We are an Australian consultancy and your data stays yours. To be clear, this is general information rather than legal advice, and your practice should confirm its own position with its adviser.

What can an AI phone agent actually handle in a general practice?

The routine and repetitive, which is most of the volume: opening hours, location and parking, whether a doctor is running behind, fees and billing arrangements, what to bring, appointment availability and enquiries, repeat script and referral request logistics under your practice policy, and taking a proper callback message with the details reception needs. What it does not do is give clinical advice, interpret symptoms, triage urgency or discuss results. Urgent presentations are directed to 000 or an emergency department, and anything clinical, distressed or unclear goes to a human immediately. Every call leaves a written summary.

We already use an online booking and SMS reminder tool. Does this replace it?

Usually not, and we would rather add value than create an argument between systems. Plenty of practices run an online booking and reminder product alongside Bp and are happy with it, in which case we work around it and fill the gaps it leaves: the calls it never answers, the recall cycle it does not chase properly, the intake it does not validate, the correspondence backlog, the claim exceptions, and the practice report. If it turns out you are paying for overlapping tools, we will say so during discovery rather than quietly building a fourth one.

How long does it take, and what does it cost?

Most practices are live in two to six weeks, depending on how many admin areas are in scope and how quickly the interface questions with Best Practice Software and your IT provider settle. On cost, we scope properly rather than quoting sight unseen. Strategy and scoping engagements start at $1,000 AUD for a focused BASIC piece, $3,000 for a STANDARD engagement, and $10,000 for a STRATEGIC one across a larger group or multi-site practice. After discovery you get a fixed scope, timeframe and price before any build begins, so there is nothing open-ended to sign.

Do we need our IT provider or our practice manager heavily involved?

Your practice manager, yes, because they know how the day really runs and their sign-off is what makes the design correct. Expect a couple of workshops and some review time, not a second job. Your IT provider needs to be in the loop because they own the server, the backups and the change windows, so we bring them in early and coordinate around clinic hours rather than surprising them. Beyond that we handle the build, the testing, the pilot, the training and the ongoing monitoring. You do not need technical staff of your own.

Give Your Reception Team Their Day Back

Book a call and we will walk your practice day with you, count where the admin hours actually go around Best Practice, and show you exactly which piece we would automate first and what it would be worth. No obligation, no pressure, and a straight answer about what is and is not possible with Bp.