Can Best Practice or Medical Director run in the cloud?

Yes. Best Practice and Medical Director both run well on cloud infrastructure such as AWS when hosted properly. What changes is resilience: no server in a storeroom with one motherboard between your doctors and their patient records, secure remote access behind multi-factor authentication, and capacity that becomes a configuration change rather than a hardware purchase.

The question exists because both products grew up as on-premise software, and plenty of practices still run them on a server bought years ago and quietly aging in a back room. Nothing about that history prevents cloud hosting now; it simply means the move is a proper migration with clinical integrations attached, rather than a copy-paste, and the quality of that migration is where the whole answer lives. The vendors themselves also offer hosted options these days, so the real decision is rarely whether the software can leave the storeroom, but who engineers the move and what they verify on the way.

Start with what you gain, because it is concrete. Resilience first: Adelaide City General Practice, an AGPAL-accredited medical centre in the Adelaide CBD, ran Medical Director and its clinical systems on hardware where a single motherboard failure would have meant at least a full business day without patient records. We migrated those systems to AWS, and that single point of failure is gone; infrastructure failures in a proper cloud environment are absorbed rather than worn by the practice.

Second, access. With the clinical system hosted, doctors reach it securely from outside the practice, from home after hours, from another site, behind multi-factor authentication through tools such as DUO, so a stolen password alone opens nothing. For the Adelaide City General Practice doctors, that remote access was part of the same migration, alongside Microsoft 365 and an uplift to Essential Eight Maturity Level 1. Third, capacity: adding a doctor, a room or a location becomes configuration, not a purchase order and a fortnight of waiting for hardware.

Now the caveats, which deserve equal billing because they are where migrations succeed or fail. The first is the internet connection: a cloud-hosted practice depends on it, so a proper migration includes a 4G or 5G failover link sized for clinical work, tested like everything else. Skip that and you have not removed your single point of failure; you have relocated it from the storeroom to the street cabinet. The failover is also the item most often quietly missing from cheaper proposals, which makes it a useful comparison question.

The second caveat is integrations, and this is the paragraph to hold any provider to. A clinical system is wired into everything: pathology downloaders for SA Pathology and Healius, secure messaging through HealthLink and Medical Objects, Tyro and HICAPS terminals, Medicare and DVA claiming. Every one of those must be migrated and then individually verified at cutover, which is why cutover happens outside clinical hours, with the old system kept intact until the new one is proven. The failure mode this prevents is specific and ugly: a Monday morning where consults run but results have silently stopped arriving. Each verified integration should appear on the cutover checklist by name, ticked by a person, because a checklist is how nothing gets remembered too late.

On cost, plainly: you are trading periodic server hardware purchases and their ongoing maintenance for infrastructure billed as you use it, plus managed support, ours is published at $139 to $219 per user per month depending on the Essential Eight tier. Whether the numbers favour the move depends on practice size and the age of what you are running. A practice staring at its next server refresh usually finds the comparison compelling; a practice with a healthy, recently purchased server can reasonably schedule the decision for that machine's end of life rather than forcing it now.

The way to decide is unglamorous: find out when your current server was bought and when its next refresh or warranty cliff falls due, then get a migration plan in writing that names the integrations to be verified, the failover arrangement, and the rollback path. If a proposal is missing any of those three, it is a quote, not a plan. For a free read on where your practice stands first, the Essential Eight Cyber Security Scorecard is the easy start, or call 1800 456 567.