We’re set to revolutionise access to health data in Australia - the Launch of Halo Connect

I’m incredibly excited to announce the launch of Halo Connect. Our small and dedicated team have been building something incredible for the last 12 months and we are delighted to finally share it. 

In building and scaling Cubiko, I came to realise that data analysis leads to better patient outcomes and improved financial sustainability of medical practices. But the data was difficult to unlock. Support costs for an on-premise data extraction tool was always in the back of my mind. And moving into additional health verticals we would have to build new integrations each time, this wasn’t repeatable. I knew scaling would be hard, and talking with my peers I knew they had the same troubles.

So I decided to do something about it.

I approached my co-founders Brett Thebault & Marty Conneely about the problems we were seeing in the industry. Then we teamed up with the amazing product, engineering and go-to-market team at Aginic Ventures. 

Together we built a client and cloud infrastructure to seamlessly connect data on-prem and cloud infrastructure in a safe, secure and scalable way. 

Being a former practice manager, I knew we had to protect sometimes delicate on-prem infrastructure, being a startup founder, I knew we had to make interoperability easier (and cheaper!) and being a lover of Primary Care, I knew we needed to do it in a safe and privacy compliant way. 

The partnership between Best Practice and Halo all began over lunch and many coffees in early 2022 with the insightful Danielle Bancroft and forward-thinking Jessica White and in follow-up conversations with Frank Pand Lorraine Pyefinch. Together we realised that Halo Connect, in partnership with our launch PMS integration - Best Practice had a chance to bring interoperability on a scale to General Practice.

We doubled down on our focus of launching the first cloud-based APIs for Best Practice Premier. 

In announcing our launch along with Best Practice’s investment, we are excited to ramp up development and over the next 12 months, we are laser-focused on bringing to the industry a full set of REST and FHIR APIs. 

From an initial beta program with Cubiko, Halo Connect is quickly scaling to be in 1,000 practices which leads to better practice experience and a better experience for our software engineers. 

What is the Healthcare Interoperability Crisis?

We’ve struggled in Australia over the past twenty-odd years with archaic government software platforms and innovative but legacy on-premise software platforms. There has been a wealth of SaaS cloud-native software integrators entering the healthcare industry, from telehealth to accounting software. But the underlying architecture of data transfer between various systems remained the same. 

Many people tried to blame on-premise software - but I would say that is just an excuse - being on-premise is not a blocker to Interoperability and, in fact, can keep our Doctors, Nurses and Receptionists happy. It is up to us, the innovators and the entrepreneurs, to come up with solutions. 

Data was siloed across government agencies, on-premise software or SaaS software integrators. This led to worse patient outcomes, increased costs for all parties and increased challenges in doing business. 

Our mission is to solve the healthcare interoperability crisis. 

We’ve built the first cloud-based APIs available for Best Practice Premier, unlocking immense value for the large partner network.