Modernising practice management for business owners

Genie Solutions is Australia’s market leader in practice-management software for specialist doctors. Their flagship desktop product had run specialist practices for years, but the market was shifting to the cloud, and expectations were rising with it. Genie Solutions partnered with Thoughtworks to build Gentu: a cloud-native successor designed from the ground up.

Specialist doctors aren’t just clinicians; they’re small-business owners. Between consulting rooms, hospital lists, and operating theatres, they had little time left for the software that ran their practice.

• Legacy complexity: years of accumulated features made the incumbent desktop software powerful but daunting: new front-desk staff took weeks to become confident.
• Tied to the practice: an on-premise install meant local servers, manual updates, and backups, and no easy access for specialists working across multiple rooms and hospitals.
• High-stakes admin: appointments, billing, and health-fund claiming are the financial engine of a practice. Errors cost real money and eroded trust.

I facilitated UX workshops with Genie Solutions and spent time where the work actually happens: at the front desk. My clinical background helped translate between the language of healthcare and the language of software.

• Practice managers and receptionists juggled phones, walk-ins, and the diary at once, so the calendar had to be glanceable and forgiving.
• Specialists wanted a clear picture of their day and their billing without wading through admin screens.
• Journey mapping a day in the life of a practice exposed where the legacy workflow created double-handling, from booking to invoice to claim.

Rather than porting the legacy product to the browser, we designed Gentu around the workflows that mattered most, and shipped iteratively alongside Thoughtworks engineers.

• Appointments first: a clean, scannable calendar built for the pace of a specialist front desk.
• Simplicity as a feature: we deliberately resisted feature-for-feature parity with the legacy product, prioritising the tasks practices did every day.
• Prototype, test, refine: concepts were validated with practice staff through iterative rounds of prototyping and usability testing.
• Embedded with engineers: designing inside a cross-functional Thoughtworks delivery team kept the gap between design intent and shipped product small.

Gentu shipped as Genie Solutions’ cloud platform for specialist practices, and remains a core part of their product family today.

• Anywhere access: practices moved from a server in a cupboard to a browser: rooms, hospital, or home. Today that includes a companion mobile app for specialists on the move.
• Faster onboarding: a focused, modern interface meant new staff got productive quickly instead of training on legacy complexity.
• A platform to grow on: the cloud foundation opened the door to continuous delivery of improvements, and an ecosystem of integrations from telehealth to e-prescribing.

Real numbers, real practices, real results: how Gentu is making a difference across Australia today.