You don't have to manage complex patients alone — get paid to coordinate care

The platform logs the duration and prompts the correct item number at the end of the conference. You submit the claim through your usual channels, the way you always have.

Most GPs starting out haven’t. Our clinician-led team is on the call for your first conference — helping choose the patient beforehand, guiding the discussion where it helps, and making sure the item and the documentation are right at the end. You are not working it out on your own in front of a room of clinicians.

If the hold-up is deciding which patient, that is the most common place to stall — choosing a patient is a two-minute read that usually settles it.

Not as the vehicle for the plan itself. They are separate services with separate item numbers¹¹, and the explanatory note is explicit that a case conference item “cannot be used as part of the development or review of a GP chronic condition management plan or multidisciplinary care plan”.

What a conference can do is inform one. The same note is just as clear in the other direction — where a conference “is clinically relevant for a patient who has a plan, and is separate to developing or reviewing the plan, multidisciplinary case conference items may be used”. A patient can have both, and what you take from the discussion is yours to use as you see fit. Explanatory note AN.0.49.

The item descriptors put the same thing in claiming terms: a conference billed as a service associated with a care planning service is excluded. In practice that means keeping the two apart on the day — we have seen same-day claims rejected on exactly that basis.

Clinical information is shared verbally or by screen-share during the conference. Calls aren’t recorded or transcribed, so the discussion itself is never captured. What is kept is the clinical note written during the session — that is the record of the conference, stored securely, available to you and sent through to the practice.

As long as the patient’s presentation calls for. The item tiers start at 15 minutes and there’s no upper limit — how long a case needs is your clinical judgement, not ours. It runs on secure video from your consulting room or from home, in any browser — nothing to install — and if your practice isn’t set up for telehealth yet, we’ll get you going. GPs often book a single block and cover more than one patient in it; how you structure it is your call.

Usually not — you take the outcome back to your patient at their next consult. Some GPs do invite patients to sit in, and find it helps them take ownership of their care.

Teams are built from the clinicians nearest you — so the people in your conference are local to your patients and reachable if you later refer. The network reaches every state and territory and is still growing; where your area is thin at the start, our team recruits specialists and allied health near you.

Composition is always your call. Most GPs tell us what the patient needs and a team is brought together from our clinician network to match — and many then run the same slot with the same clinicians every week. If you’d rather have particular specialists or allied health, including someone you already work with who isn’t on Conference.care yet, tell us and we’ll arrange it.

The conference is as long as the case needs — the shortest item tier starts at 15 minutes. Around it, you name the patient and say what input they need — a minute, when you add them. Afterwards you talk the outcome through at their next consult and drop the summary into your records. The consent, the invitations, the diary wrangling and the write-up aren’t yours.

Fair question, and the honest answer is that it’s the whole product. Clinicians are recruited against a standard, then continually evaluated and supported — on the quality of what they bring to a case, not on how many they’ll take.

Their own, wherever they have them — name the providers when you add the patient and the invitations go out to them. Where nobody’s available in a discipline the case calls for, our clinical team brings someone in. Medicare allows for exactly that: the explanatory note for these items states that “the health professional is not required to have a pre-existing relationship with the patient”, and that a referral isn’t required either. They advise you; whether anyone ends up treating your patient is your call.

Three, and worth knowing upfront. It’s for patients with chronic or complex needs — an acute presentation isn’t suitable. The patient has to agree to the conference, and we give you the leaflet and the prompts for that conversation. And the allied health participation items can’t be claimed within three months of the last one unless the patient’s condition or circumstances have changed significantly — scheduling accounts for that.

Then you’ve spent one short conference finding out, and you know. There’s nothing to cancel, nothing to unwind and nothing owing. We’ll help you pick a patient likely to benefit for the first one, which is usually the difference between a conference that lands and one that doesn’t.

No preparation is required. Patient history and notes can be accessed and shared during the conference, so there’s no non-billable prep — though you may wish to review the file beforehand.

Patients with complex or multiple chronic conditions, unclear progress, or high risk of hospitalisation — where coordinating several clinicians could improve outcomes.

Each member has to provide a different kind of care or service to the patient, so two clinicians from the same specialty can both take part where each brings something genuinely different. Two things to watch: a specialist-organised conference asks for different disciplines outright, and no more than two doctors count toward the minimum team either way.

Conference.care is completely free for GPs and specialists. You claim the Medicare rebate as usual; we never take a cut.