A Clinifyd alternative to Nookal · practice management for allied health

What Nookal is good at

An honest description

Nookal is Australian-built and aimed squarely at clinics with several practitioners and real operational complexity. Its case management, claims handling and reporting go deeper than most, and clinics that have invested time in configuring it tend to defend it — which is usually the sign of software that repaid the effort.

What we hear from clinics looking around

The conversations we have are mostly about the shape of the day rather than the feature list: people want fewer places to type the same thing twice, and they want the clinical writing to be somewhere they trust when the internet drops mid-note.

We do not run Nookal, so we will not tell you what it cannot do — the people who can answer that are Nookal and the clinic down the road who uses it. Everything below is only about us.

What Clinifyd does differently

Clinical writing cannot be lost

A note saves itself a couple of seconds after you stop typing, and keeps a copy in the browser while the server is unreachable — so a dropped connection, a closed laptop or a flat battery does not cost you the consultation. A note is very often the only record of something that has already happened, and asking a clinician to reconstruct it a day later is asking them to invent it.

Built in a clinic that is still running

Clinifyd is written inside a working physiotherapy practice in Adelaide and used on real patients every day. The diary in the screenshots is the one the practice runs on. That is not a slogan about authenticity — it is why a bug a physiotherapist hits on Monday tends to be fixed by Wednesday, because the person who wrote it has to use it on Thursday.

Everything on a screen is also an API

Every capability lands as an API route first, behind the same permission, and the screen is built as a client of it. If a screen can do something a key with the right permissions cannot, we treat that as a bug. It means a report, an integration or a migration is possible without waiting for us to build it.

Your records leave in one click

Full CSV export of patients, appointments, notes and invoices, whenever you want, without asking us and without a fee. Every export is recorded in the audit log. We would rather show you the exit before you sign up than have you discover it does not exist two years in.

We read Nookal well enough to import a stock list and a patient list from it, and it is the system this clinic itself moved off — so this page is written by people who have done the move rather than described it.

Moving your patients across

You can do it yourself

Export your patient list from Nookal as a CSV and load it in Manage → Bring your data. The columns are read from the file's own headings, so you do not have to tell us what shape the export is in or rename anything first.

Nothing is written until you have seen it

The first pass only reads: it shows which columns were recognised, how many patients would be created, and who would be skipped because they are already here. You decide after seeing that, rather than before.

A date it cannot read, it refuses to guess

03/04/1980 is March in one country and April in another. Rather than pick, the import leaves that date blank and tells you the line number. A wrong date of birth decides concession eligibility and which of two same-named patients you have open.

Run both for a fortnight

We would rather you kept Nookal running alongside for the first couple of weeks than trusted a migration on anybody's word, including ours. See what moving involves.

Questions worth asking any vendor

How do I get my data out?

Ask before you sign up, not after. Ours is a CSV export of patients, appointments, notes and invoices, available to you without asking us and without a fee. If the answer involves a support ticket or a quote, that is the answer.

What happens to a note if my internet drops?

In Clinifyd it keeps saving locally and recovers when you come back. It is a dull question until the day it is the only question, which is usually the day somebody loses a consultation.

Can a paid invoice be edited?

Ours cannot. A correction is a credit note plus a replacement, and the original keeps its number and date. Convenient editing of paid invoices is a problem waiting for an audit.

Who is actually building it?

Two people, in a clinic that sees patients. That is a real limitation — we are smaller than everything else on this page — and it is also why the person who fixes a bug is the person who hit it.

Also worth looking at

If you are comparing properly, compare widely. These are the other systems clinics in Australia usually shortlist.

Clinifyd, if you are weighing it against Nookal