Too busy to chase compliance deadlines? Hand it to your vendor and calculate how much you'll save.
By now, most practices know the outline of the past fortnight. Following strong advocacy from the RACGP, the Federal Government pulled the 1 July Assignment of Benefit changes apart in the final days before the deadline for their introduction, extending verbal consent, bringing Enduring Assignment forward for several patient groups, and folding what was left into a twelve-month transition period.
What’s worth examining is the gap the shake-up exposed between practices that had to lift a finger when the requirements changed, and practices that didn’t. Perhaps more importantly, what that gap cost.
The lesson underneath the announcement
The easy reading of all this is that practices dodged a bullet, and in the narrowest sense they did. But twelve months of extra runway still leaves the same requirement for lift-off waiting at the end of it. That requirement is being negotiated live, in public, with practices watching the terms shift from inside the process.
For a practice that spent the last month building a paper-based workaround for the expected 1 July rules, that workaround needed revision before it was implemented. Verbal consent windows have widened, Enduring Assignment has been pulled forward for entire patient cohorts, and compliance timelines have moved out again.
Each of those changes is a rewrite of the instructions the front desk was trained on a fortnight ago; none of the actual changes were known when that training happened.
The RACGP’s 2025 Health of the Nation report found that 70% of GPs are already concerned about administrative workload and cited this part of their job as the leading reason they plan to leave the profession. The AoB changes could have been the straw that broke the proverbial camel’s back.
For cloud-native practice management systems, the job of watching the RACGP’s advocacy, the government’s amendments, and the shape of the transition period is the vendor’s responsibility, not the practice’s.
The vendor’s team monitors and reviews regulation changes, and prepares the software so it’s ready to use from the get go, without any need to go offline, update and reboot. This adds value to the cloud-native software. It’s time back at the front desk, money not spent rebuilding a workaround that was barely finished, and one fewer deadline for a practice manager to track.
Why the deployment model decides the outcome
This is precisely the scenario cloud-native software was built around, and the government’s last-minute changes have only sharpened the point.
Cloud software is delivered as a continuous stream of updates and does not need to know in advance whether a rule is cemented on 1 July or still moving through a transition period that runs into mid-2027, because the platform absorbs whichever version of the rule is current and the practice does not have to act on it at all. A practice running a system like that simply keeps working.
MediRecords built the Assignment of Benefit workflow directly into its billing process ahead of 1 July, on the view that the requirement should be delivered through the platform rather than managed around it.
The transition period does not undo that work, since it simply extends the runway the workflow was already built for. As the Enduring Assignment provisions widen and the detail of the 12-month review takes shape, the same workflow keeps adjusting in the background, which is the entire point of building compliance into cloud-native software rather than bolting it on afterwards.
The wider point
The Assignment of Benefit shake-up won’t be the last time a Medicare rule moves later than promised, or comes back for a second look once it has already landed.
Indexation happens most years, MBS items are amended regularly, and My Health Record obligations continue to expand. Every future revision like this one will cost a practice in hours, in retraining, and in risk.
That ongoing cost is the real measure of how a practice’s software choice plays out over time. On an on-premise system that must be updated by hand, that bill keeps arriving with every change and every extension, on top of infrastructure costs and IT support invoices. On a cloud platform built to update itself, it simply does not.
If it is worth putting a number on that difference, MediRecords has built an interactive return-on-investment calculator that weighs the ongoing cost of a practice’s current setup against the cost of moving to a cloud-native platform.
Rather than take the argument above on faith, see the figures for a practice of your own size at pricing.medirecords.com/#roi-calculator.
HSD publisher Jeremy Knibbs is a non-executive director of MediRecords.
