AHPRA, Privacy Act, and My Health Record: where each tool actually stands
Allied health practitioners carry obligations that generic booking software was never designed to meet. Before choosing between OneBookPlus and Cliniko, it’s worth being honest about what each platform does — and doesn’t — do for your regulatory load.
AHPRA-compliant clinical record-keeping
The AHPRA Code of Conduct (and the profession-specific Boards’ guidelines for physiotherapy, chiropractic, occupational therapy, podiatry, and the self-regulating massage and naturopathy associations) expect contemporaneous notes attributable to the practitioner who delivered the service, retained for seven years from the last entry for adults and until age 25 for minors.
Cliniko was purpose-built for this. It offers structured treatment notes with templates (including SOAP), per-user attribution, immutable edit history, and indefinite retention while your subscription is active. OneBookPlus stores client notes with timestamp and user attribution, but does not currently ship clinical templates, body charts, or a tamper-evident audit trail of note edits. For a sole physio or massage therapist documenting visits in narrative form, OneBookPlus is workable; for chiropractic or podiatry practices that rely on structured assessment fields, Cliniko remains the more defensible record system today.
Privacy Act 1988 and the Australian Privacy Principles
Both vendors are APP entities and must comply with the OAIC’s thirteen APPs. The pressure points for a clinic are APP 6 (use only for the primary purpose), APP 11 (reasonable security steps and destruction when no longer needed), APP 12 (giving patients access to their record), and APP 13 (correction).
Cliniko hosts Australian customer data in AWS Sydney, publishes a Notifiable Data Breaches response process, and supports patient data export and per-record correction. OneBookPlus is also Australian-hosted (AWS ap-southeast-2), encrypts data at rest and in transit, and supports CSV export of client and appointment data — but our self-service patient access workflow (APP 12) is currently a manual export by the practitioner rather than a patient-initiated request. Both platforms leave breach notification timelines (30 days under Part IIIC) to the practitioner as the responsible APP entity.
My Health Record interaction
Cliniko does not offer a direct My Health Record (MHR) connector; ADHA’s conformant clinical software register is dominated by GP and specialist systems, and most allied-health practice management tools — Cliniko and OneBookPlus included — interact with MHR only via the consumer-facing portal or the National Provider Portal.
OneBookPlus has no MHR integration on the roadmap today. This is a fair gap to acknowledge: under the My Health Records Act 2012, allied-health participation is voluntary, and ADHA conformance is a non-trivial undertaking. Practitioners who actively upload shared health summaries or event summaries should continue using the National Provider Portal alongside whichever practice tool they choose.
In short: Cliniko remains the safer choice for clinically intensive allied-health work — chiropractic, podiatry, occupational therapy — where structured records and edit-audit trails are scrutinised. OneBookPlus suits sole-trader physios, massage therapists, and naturopaths who want lighter clinical documentation alongside genuine accounting, BAS, and marketing in one Australian-hosted platform.