2019
2 locations
Practice flow
2025
About Hervey Bay Doctors
Situated in the beautiful Hervey Bay region of Queensland, Hervey Bay Doctors and Craignish Doctors have built a reputation for delivering a broad scope of high-quality care to their community, from aged care and hospice services to acute care clinics and chronic condition management. Led by practice owners Dr Chris Woollard and Dr Nick Yim, the practice is also deeply invested in training the next generation of regional GPs, regularly hosting registrars and medical students.
When Dr Chris and Dr Nick took over practice in 2019, it was a small two-doctor operation still running on paper files and physical calculators. They saw the potential to innovate and use technology. Since then, they’ve grown to around 10 practitioners across two sites, driven by a simple belief: that the right technology should make it easier to deliver great care, not harder.
It’s a philosophy that extends well beyond the consulting room. Chris wears more hats than most, serving as a hospital board director and local medical association president alongside his clinical and practice ownership responsibilities. But like many practice owners, he found that one part of running the business stubbornly resisted improvement: service fees.
We caught up with Dr Chris to hear how the practice went from spending five hours every fortnight on manual service fee calculations to completing the entire process in under 30 minutes with Cubiko Calculate.
From spreadsheets and six sets of hands to a single click
Every fortnight, the team at Hervey Bay Doctors would manually pull reports from Best Practice across two sites, enter the figures into a sprawling spreadsheet, and pass the results through five or six sets of hands for data entry and checking. Contractors and employed doctors each had their own separate processes. The whole cycle consumed around four to five hours per pay run, and that was before anyone generated ABA files or sent data to the bookkeepers.
“It was a very manual process, fraught with errors,” Chris recalls. “Someone could accidentally change a formula and the whole calculation could be out. You have a new doctor, if you got their percentages wrong, it would all flow through. It was hard to pick up on mistakes. You’d have to click through a thousand different formulas and cells across an enormous spreadsheet.”
But the real cost wasn’t just the time spent on the process itself. It was the things Chris couldn’t do because of it. He’d long wanted to introduce more nuanced fee arrangements to support the practice’s growth: paying different rates for aged care visits to encourage participation, adjusting percentages for doctors who took on after-hours or short-notice shifts, and offering incentives for satellite clinic work. But with a spreadsheet already buckling under its own complexity, adding any more rules simply wasn’t worth the risk.
“I’ve been talking about it for ages and it would have just been too complex to do it previously,” Chris said. “It’s just fallen by the wayside.”
You have chosen… wisely
Chris was already an early adopter of Cubiko Insights for reporting and optimisation and appreciated how the platform cut through complexity with an intuitive interface. When Cubiko announced the launch of Calculate, he booked a demo immediately.
“I already liked how Cubiko Insights was intuitive to use and seemed to be solving a similar reporting challenge for us” Chris explains. What struck him during the demo was the accuracy and reliability of the integration. Because Calculate was built in collaboration with Best Practice, the two systems are integrated directly with eachother. There’s no intermediate step of pulling reports and manually entering data. That removes the entire chain of potential human error.
“You hit the holy grail: reliability, quality, efficiency and time saving,” he says. “Because it’s directly talking to the software, fully integrated, you know it’s accurate. It removes all the error potential and all the human time.”
Onboarding was, in Chris’s words, “ridiculously easy.” The team provided their practitioner agreement details and were off and running. With the Cubiko Insights connection to Best Practice already established, there was no additional technical setup required. Support was responsive and personal. “I would send an email and someone would always call or email back. A lot of software these days, you’ve got AI chatbots and things. Cubiko’s support was very, very easy compared to that, really responsive.”
Before fully making the switch, Chris ran Calculate alongside the old process to compare results and ensure accuracy. It didn’t take long to build confidence.
A tenfold time saving, and the confidence to match
The transformation in processing time has been dramatic. What previously consumed around five hours and five or six sets of hands now takes Chris under 30 minutes. And much of that is a deliberate final review of the service fees rather than any manual calculation.
“For contractor doctors, that’s done in minutes now because it’s so reliable,” Chris says. “The whole thing would be done in less than half an hour. It’s a huge saving. I’m not exaggerating. It’d be a tenfold saving, easily.”
Since going live, Calculate has processed every service fee run without a single calculation error. The confidence that comes from knowing the numbers are right has removed a significant source of stress from the fortnightly cycle.
“The confidence is just there,” Chris says. “That assurance that I know my part, when I’ve given it to the accountant, is right. Then all I have to do is check that they put it in correctly for the ABA file.”
The practitioners adapted quickly too. The document templates, particularly for top-up calculations and adjustments, were laid out more intuitively than the old spreadsheets. After one or two minor questions, both the doctors and their accountants were satisfied. No one has come back with a query since.
Thinking strategically instead of being stuck on the mouse wheel
Perhaps the most unexpected benefit has been what Calculate has enabled Chris to think about rather than just process. With complex rules now easy to implement, arrangements that were previously too difficult to manage manually are suddenly on the table.
The practice already uses Calculate to handle aged care visits at a reduced 20% service fee to encourage participation, medical student supervision fees, an acute care clinic with a guaranteed hourly rate, hospice work, and a daily on-call fee. But Chris sees this as just the beginning.
“It’s allowing me to think and do things I’ve been wanting to do for a long time,” he explains. “I thought I was just shortening a process, but it’s got that flow-on effect. Freeing up your brain time and your staff time to think about how to do things better, rather than just pumping out the same sausage.”
With plans to continue growing across both sites, Chris is exploring even more ways to use Calculate’s rule engine, including site-specific fee arrangements and item-level adjustments for nurse-led services. The practice is also looking at activating Calculate’s Xero integration to further streamline the handoff to their bookkeepers.
For any practice still wrestling with manual spreadsheets, juggling different arrangements for contractors and employed doctors, or spending their Monday mornings buried in Best Practice reports, Chris’s message is simple: the solution exists, it works, and it’s easier than you think.