We’re proud to share the story of One Central Health, a psychology-led clinic that’s using Cliniko to help clients access a wide range of specialised providers working together. Here's the scoop on how Cliniko helped them expand their team and locations.
Michelle Geslewitz·
Founded in 2015, One Central Health is a Perth-based healthcare business with branches across Western Australia. They aim to support “adults and children of all abilities and their families, working as a team to offer best-practice therapy.” Currently, their client split is about 80% children with a growing number of adult clients attending the clinic.
In just a few years, One Central Health has expanded from offering treatments at one site to operating five locations, plus services in other parts of Western Australia through their extension programme. The business’s core services include assessments for autism, assessments for learning abilities, fussy eating support, and more.
The group of clinics is headed up by founding director and psychologist Alana Maley-Berg, who works with a team of paediatricians, occupational therapists, speech pathologists, other behavioural therapists and psychologists, and administrative staff.
Maley-Berg's goal is to deliver multiple disciplines of best-practice care all in one place. That's something clients don't often find in the famously-remote areas of Western Australia.
As she added more clinicians from different modalities to her team one by one, Maley-Berg found she needed a way to facilitate a coordinated system for everyone to use. It had to be easy for new staff to learn yet powerful enough to grow with her business needs. Enter Cliniko!
Here is how Cliniko helped One Central Health quickly scale and synchronise all of their services, so the team could focus on providing the highest standards of care to their clients.
Teamwork between care providers can be one of the most effective ways to ensure a good outcome for clients—or, conversely, cause disruption when things aren’t working so smoothly.
Some of the most vulnerable clients often in need of on-going, multi-disciplinary care are children with behavioural or developmental disabilities. In Australia, parents report waiting for about one year for their young children to receive an autism diagnosis. It can take even longer for older children.
Then, autistic children and their families may experience delays in accessing different treatment services, like occupational therapy to help them develop their handwriting, behaviour management, and social skills. Difficulty receiving treatment can be a real setback for children, and add extra strain for parents who may be struggling to cope.
The National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS) offers financial support for Australian families who receive a diagnosis. However, finding all the necessary services can prove tricky for parents on their own, especially in geographic areas where there is a shortage of practitioners specialising in the relevant modalities.
Maley-Berg sought to change this experience. That was her ambition in creating One Central Health, a unique clinic where young clients and their families can embark on a full, coordinated treatment pathway in one central place.
For families seeking an autism assessment at One Central Health, the pathway typically begins with a visit to a paediatrician, who then refers clients to a psychologist and speech pathologist at the clinic. All three professionals must agree for an autism diagnosis to be confirmed.
From there, clients may receive tailored, on-going treatments between the modalities depending on their individual needs. Sometimes practitioners will hold joint sessions with therapists from two different disciplines, which is made possible by the clinic’s comprehensive approach.
In order to carry off this client-centric strategy, Maley-Berg had to build her practice from the ground up. She started out offering just psychology services, then expanded her team to include speech pathology and occupational therapy.
It was as she added new disciplines to the team that Maley-Berg realised she needed a practice management system to create a unified experience, behind the scenes, at the reception desks, and in treatment rooms.
By bringing these multi-disciplinary services directly into her clinic, Maley-Berg knew she could prevent the miscommunication caused by disparate care from the outside. Still, her vision for how her clinic should run from both the client and clinician’s perspective didn’t end there.
There were a few things she knew were essential to make her dream a success.
First, she wanted clients to have an easy, straight-forward experience booking appointments for different services as soon as they needed them—no more on-going delays or sourcing specialists on their own.
It was essential to her that there was a unified, organised appointment system in place, especially once she realised how big One Central Health could become in terms of clinic numbers and distribution throughout Western Australia.
One Central Health also needed a centralised client database. To create an efficient experience for clinicians and clients alike, all the documents, forms, and clinical notes needed to live in a single place, where relevant clinicians could easily read them but where they’d also be safe from prying eyes, loss, or theft. The system chosen needed to be powerfully built to keep up with the clinic’s rapid growth. But it also needed to be easy for new staff to learn (even if they’re not very tech-savvy). That meant Maley-Berg was looking for software that she and all her practitioners could easily use, with minimal time lost to the learning curve.
In short, Maley-Berg needed software that she could rely on to help keep everything running smoothly inside the walls of her clinics, so her clinicians could focus on treatment rather than extra administration.
She first discovered Cliniko while Googling and researching the available options. It ticked all the boxes on her list. After a bit of due diligence, she dove into a free trial and never looked back.
On reflection, the icing on the cake for her was Cliniko’s pricing structure, which increases incrementally based on the number of practitioners in the business. The first few subscription tiers were created with smaller clinics in mind, which meant she was paying a fair rate in proportion to the size of her clinic.
The multi-disciplinary approach has proven to be a phenomenal success for One Central Health. The business has expanded continuously, putting high-quality, in-depth care within reach for thousands more families across Western Australia.
To date, their client roster has grown mainly through word of mouth. Maley-Berg attributes this to the positive impact the clinic has had on its local communities, but also to the unified experience for clients and staff made possible through the use of a single practice management system.
New staff are largely able to self-train when it comes to using Cliniko, and consistently report that it’s easy to use, intuitive and simple. If they do get stuck, unlimited, 100% free support is available on our site, along with detailed help articles and a community forum, so answers are always within reach. Onboarding at One Central Health typically revolves around understanding clinic processes rather than learning a new system. That means training can be focused on compliance and client care standards rather than tech basics.
While clinicians and administrators tend to use different functions within Cliniko, the fact that everyone in the business uses the same software has a unifying effect. It reminds everyone they’re on the same team, even if they’re not in the same building—or even the same town!
Cliniko has also helped remove administrative pressures for Maley-Berg and her business managers in some unexpected ways. For example, the clinic recently hired a marketing officer to increase the clinic’s proactive growth. He was able to use Cliniko’s reporting features to quickly gain a lay of the land, by measuring new client numbers and analysing top referral sources, among other things.
The future looks bright for One Central Health. We wish them all the best in continuing to provide life-changing support for families in Western Australia. And we’ll be right in step with them as they continue to grow at lightning speed.
Read more about One Central Health and the services they offer.
Or, if you’re not already a Cliniko customer and are interested in trying it out, we offer a free 30-day trial that takes seconds to set up.
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