2005
3 locations
2025
About Village Medical Highfields
Village Medical Highfields is a long-established general practice serving the rapidly growing Highfields community, just north of Toowoomba. As part of Platinum Health Group, the practice brings together experienced GPs, nurses and administrative staff with a shared focus on proactive, patient-centred care. With a strong emphasis on teamwork and preventative health, Village Medical Highfields continues to deliver high-quality care that meets the needs of its local community.
Having been part of the community for two decades, the practice balances the realities of growth, increasing demand and workforce pressures while continuing to support both patients and clinicians. We had the pleasure of catching up with Thomas Sullivan, Practice Manager at Village Medical Highfields, to learn how the team is using Cubiko data and incorporating it into their workflows. By embedding Cubiko into their everyday processes, the practice is improving patient outcomes, supporting GP work-life balance and making more informed decisions.
Improved visibility leads to uptake in health assessments
Before Cubiko, much of the work around health assessments and care planning was manual and time-consuming. Identifying eligible patients relied on needs being recognised during consultations, rather than systematically identifying services that could be discussed opportunistically during appointments or proactively reaching out to patients who were due or eligible.
“Health assessments were very patient-led,” Thomas explains. “If someone came in and the doctor identified the opportunity, we’d book it. But there wasn’t an easy way to see who was due or eligible and never had one.”
The challenge was visibility. As Thomas puts it, “The benefit of Cubiko is having access to the data, and there’s so much more data in Cubiko than what you can access through Best Practice.”
With Cubiko in place, the practice now has clear visibility of patient eligibility ahead of time. The team can flag potential services directly in Best Practice using Care Prompts, which add a note to the appointment details highlighting services such as health assessments or care plans that a patient may be due or eligible for.
The practice also uses the patient lists within Cubiko’s Item Optimisation metrics to identify patients who may be due for services and proactively reach out to book them in.
Since implementing Cubiko, this improved visibility has supported a significant increase in preventative care activity. Comparing November 2024 and November 2025, total care plan and chronic disease management billings increased by 178%, reflecting a significant uplift in preventative care activity without adding to GP workload.
Supporting GPs to meet goals while maintaining work–life balance
Supporting practitioners to meet both their personal and professional goals is an important focus for Platinum Health Group. Each year, Thomas sits down with the doctors at Village Medical Centre to do lifestyle planning, taking the time to understand what their practitioners want to achieve in the year ahead and how the practice can best support them.
Thomas shared an example of a GP who approached him wanting to increase their income. The doctor suggested that he could shorten his lunch break to fit in more patient appointments.
Like many doctors, this practitioner is known for spending extra time with patients. At times, this resulted in delays or longer wait times later in the day. Wanting to minimise this impact, while also valuing work–life balance and the importance of bringing GPs together at lunchtime for informal discussion and shared learning, Thomas looked for a solution that didn’t involve reducing breaks, extending the working day or increasing patient load.
Instead, Thomas turned to Cubiko to explore how the practice could better support the GP in meeting his financial goals without increasing workload or appointment volume.
“Instead of increasing his patient load, we used Cubiko to focus on care plans and health assessments his patients were already due or eligible for,” Thomas explains. “By proactively reaching out and booking those appointments, he was able to naturally increase his average billing per patient.”
By using Cubiko’s Possible Service Opportunities Today, along with QuickCheck, Care Prompts and Item Optimisation, the GP was able to meet his financial goals without shortening his lunch break, extending his day or sacrificing quality time with his family.
“He’s achieving his goals now and still taking his lunch break,” says Thomas. “He hasn’t added more to his plate, and that balance is really important for our doctors.”
Saving 3–4 hours a day with simplified reporting
Before Cubiko, pulling reports relied heavily on manual processes and the data available within the practice management system. Even when reports could be generated, they were often time-consuming and limited in what they could show.
“Cubiko gives us access to data we simply couldn’t get easily before,” Thomas explains. “And it’s surfaced in a way that’s actually usable.”
Since implementing Cubiko, Village Medical Centre estimates it saves between three and four hours every day across reporting, while also supporting appointment management, debtor follow-up and proactive patient engagement. As Thomas explains, “there are many areas across the practice where Cubiko helps speed up processes and reduce manual effort.”
Cubiko also supports longer-term planning for the practice. With Village Medical Centre operating at full capacity in a rapidly growing area, Cubiko’s room utilisation and demographic insights have helped inform decisions around introducing hot-desking, managing capacity and planning for future demand.
For Thomas, Cubiko stands out not just for the data, but for how easy it is to get support and build confidence using it.
“You’ve got training, webinars, the knowledge base and live chat,” he says. “Even if you can’t find something straight away, there’s always help available.”
He also emphasises that practices don’t need to use every feature at once to see value. “The key is starting with your goals,” he explains. “Everyone’s going to have different reasons for using Cubiko. Focus on what matters for your practice and build from there.”
By embedding Cubiko into everyday workflows, Village Medical Centre has been able to support better patient care, more sustainable GP workloads and a more efficient practice overall, without adding unnecessary complexity for the team.