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There’s no shortage of hype about artificial intelligence in medicine. In general practice specifically, I think the realistic and valuable role over the next few years is narrower — and more useful — than the headlines suggest: taking administrative weight off clinicians so they can spend more time with patients.

Augmentation, not automation

The clearest example is documentation. A large part of a GP’s day goes into notes, referrals, and paperwork. Tools that help draft documentation from a consultation — with the doctor reviewing and approving every word — can give time back without touching clinical judgement. The key phrase is “with the doctor reviewing”: the AI drafts, the clinician decides.

That principle is the line I think general practice has to hold. AI can summarise, surface, and speed things up. It should not be making diagnoses or treatment decisions on its own, and patients are entitled to know that a human doctor is responsible for their care.

Privacy is non-negotiable

Health information is among the most sensitive data there is. Any AI tool used in a clinic has to meet a high bar for how patient data is stored, secured, and used — and that bar should be set before the tool is deployed, not bolted on afterwards.

Used with those guardrails, the upside is real: less administrative grind, less burnout, and more of the time that drew people to general practice in the first place. Used carelessly, it’s a liability. The job of anyone running clinics is to capture the first while refusing the second — practical, supervised, and privacy-first, rather than chasing whatever’s loudest this month.

I started Family Doctor in 2008 with a single clinic. More than fifteen years and 112+ clinics later, the lessons that matter most aren’t the ones I expected at the start.

Hire people who care more about the work than the title — then get out of their way. A network only works if the people running each clinic have genuine autonomy. The trick is to centralise the back office and decentralise the judgement, not the other way around.

Systems are a form of respect. Every hour a GP or practice manager spends fighting bad software, chasing compliance, or redoing payroll is an hour stolen from patients and from their own life. Building the boring infrastructure well is one of the highest-leverage things a healthcare company can do, even though no one writes headlines about it.

Be deliberate about capital. Growth needs funding, but the form of the funding shapes the company. We chose to stay doctor-owned and to fund expansion with debt rather than selling equity, because who owns you determines who you answer to. That’s a lesson I’d give any founder in a regulated, mission-driven field.

Stay close to the work. At scale it’s easy to drift into a world of dashboards and lose contact with what actually happens in a consulting room or at a front desk. I still practise, and I’m still personally involved in the practices we bring in, because the day you stop understanding the work is the day you start making bad decisions about it.

Fifteen years in, I’m more convinced than ever that the boring fundamentals — good people, good systems, patient capital, and staying close to the ground — beat any clever strategy. They’re just much harder to stick to.

We talk about Australia’s “GP shortage” as though doctors are uniformly scarce. In the places that feel it most, the problem isn’t only how many GPs we train — it’s where they end up. Some inner-city suburbs have a clinic on every corner while an outer-metro or regional town struggles to keep a single one open.

Why distribution is hard

The economics of running a clinic are toughest exactly where doctors are scarcest: smaller populations, thinner margins, and harder recruitment. Left alone, a market concentrates services where they’re easiest to provide, not where they’re most needed. That’s not a moral failing of individual doctors; it’s the predictable result of the incentives.

Part of what a network can do is change that arithmetic. Centralised recruitment, shared systems, and the ability to absorb a lean early period can make it viable to keep a clinic running in a town that couldn’t support a standalone practice. That’s a large part of why Family Doctor operates across six states and territories rather than clustering in a handful of capital-city postcodes.

Succession is where it bites hardest

It’s also why succession matters so much regionally. A retiring rural GP with no successor isn’t only a personal milestone — it can be the moment a town loses access to a doctor. Keeping those practices open is unglamorous work that rarely makes the news, but it’s where the shortage is felt most sharply.

None of this replaces the bigger policy levers — training places, rural incentives, Medicare settings. But while those debates continue, the practical question for anyone running clinics is simpler: can you make it work where it’s needed, not just where it’s easy? That’s the test I think the system should be judged on.

Many GP owners reach a point where they want to step back, and almost all of them share the same worry: that selling the practice they built means handing their patients and staff to a corporate that will change everything to suit a head office. For some buyers, that fear is well-founded. It doesn’t have to be the outcome.

What should stay the same

When a practice joins Family Doctor, the things that made it work are meant to stay: the name over the door, the team at the front desk, and the doctors and the way they practise. What changes is the burden the owner was carrying alone — recruitment, compliance, IT, accreditation, payroll. We take that on so the clinical and community identity can stay put.

What I look for in a practice isn’t just a balance sheet. It’s a real connection to its community and a team worth keeping. The deal has to make commercial sense — we’re a business, not a charity — but a clinic is not a widget, and treating it like one is how you destroy the thing you just bought.

Why ownership structure matters to a seller

Because Family Doctor is 100% doctor-owned, an owner selling to us isn’t feeding an external investor’s return; they’re handing over to a group run by doctors who answer to patients and their own clinicians. KKR’s 2025 financing was private credit, not equity, so it didn’t change that. For a lot of retiring GPs, who they hand the keys to matters as much as the price.

The alternative to a good succession is often worse than people admit: a practice that simply winds down, taking decades of patient relationships and a handful of local jobs with it. Selling shouldn’t mean selling out. Done properly, it’s how a practice — and the care it provides a community — outlives the person who started it.

As a medical group grows, the thing that quietly determines whether it stays true to its purpose is governance — the structures that decide who makes which decisions, and to whom they answer. It’s an unglamorous subject that turns out to matter enormously.

Clinical and commercial decisions are not the same

Good governance in healthcare starts by separating two kinds of decision. Clinical decisions — how patients are cared for — belong with clinicians. Commercial decisions — how the organisation is funded and run — have to be sound, but they must not reach into the consulting room. Where that line blurs, patients are the ones who pay. Keeping it sharp is a governance choice, made deliberately and defended over time.

Owner-led, not absentee

I completed the Australian Institute of Company Directors course in 2018 because running a network of this size demands real discipline: financial rigour, risk management, accountability. But discipline doesn’t require handing control to people removed from the work. Family Doctor is doctor-owned and owner-led — the people accountable for the organisation are the people who understand what happens in a clinic.

When we took on private credit from KKR in 2025, governance was central to how we structured it: financing that funds the mission without giving an outside party a vote over clinical or strategic direction. Capital is useful; control is not for sale. That, to me, is what governance in healthcare is ultimately for — making sure the organisation can grow without losing the thing it exists to do.

Some of the most important decisions we’ve made at Family Doctor weren’t about growth at all — they were about preventing closures. When a clinic in a regional town shuts, the consequence isn’t an inconvenience; it can mean the nearest doctor is now an hour’s drive away.

The 2022 rescue

In 2022, when a previous operator collapsed, we stepped in to keep around a dozen regional practices open. The commercial case for each one in isolation was not obvious — which is precisely why a shareholder-owned group might have walked past them. Because we answer to our own doctors and the communities they serve rather than to outside investors, we could take them on and keep the doors open.

Succession is the quiet crisis

A large share of Australia’s regional GPs are approaching retirement, and many have no one lined up to take over. A practice without a successor is a practice at risk of closing — taking decades of patient relationships with it. Part of what we offer retiring owners is continuity: a way to hand over their clinic knowing it will keep running for their patients and their staff, rather than simply winding down.

None of this is charity; a sustainable network has to be a sound business. But the measure that matters most to me isn’t the clinic count — it’s how many communities still have a local doctor because we were willing to take on the practices others wouldn’t.

“GP corporate” is shorthand for a familiar model in Australian healthcare: a large company buys up clinics, standardises them, and runs them to a head-office formula. People reasonably assume any group with 100+ clinics is one of those. I push back on the label for Family Doctor — not as spin, but because the operating model is genuinely different, and the difference is the whole point.

What “locally-run” means in practice

A clinic that joins us keeps its name, its team, and its place in the community. The doctors who work there make the clinical decisions — how long a consultation runs, how a patient is managed, which services the clinic offers its area. Those are not choices that should be made in a boardroom, and at Family Doctor they aren’t.

What we centralise is the work GPs shouldn’t have to do themselves: recruitment, compliance, IT, payroll, accreditation, the back-office machinery that quietly consumes a practice owner’s evenings. Done well, that support frees clinicians to focus on patients rather than paperwork. Done as a “corporate” would, it becomes a lever to standardise care. The line between the two is ownership and intent.

Why ownership decides the question

When outside shareholders own a medical group, there is structural pressure for clinical decisions to serve a financial return. Family Doctor is 100% doctor-owned, with no external shareholders and no board of investors. That isn’t a marketing line — it shapes what we can say no to. We can keep a clinic open in a town that a pure-profit lens would close. We can let a GP practise the way their training and judgement dictate.

Scale and local autonomy are often treated as opposites. The bet I’ve made is that they don’t have to be — if you keep ownership with the people doing the work, you can have the support of a large network without the homogenisation of a corporate one. That’s the model. Whether it deserves the “corporate” label, I’ll let our doctors and patients judge.

When news broke that KKR — one of the world’s largest investment firms — was backing Family Doctor, a lot of people assumed the obvious: another Australian GP group had sold out to private equity. It’s a fair assumption, because that’s usually how the story goes. It isn’t ours.

The A$300 million facility KKR provided in 2025 is private credit — debt, not equity. We borrowed against the strength of the business to refinance and to keep acquiring clinics. What we did not do is sell shares, hand over a board seat, or give an external investor a say in how our doctors practise. Family Doctor remains 100% doctor-owned.

That distinction matters more than it might sound. When investors own equity in a medical group, the pressure to maximise their return can reach into clinical decisions — consult lengths, billing models, which services get prioritised. Debt is different. Our lenders want the loan repaid; they have no say over how a GP runs a consultation. Keeping ownership with doctors keeps those decisions where they belong.

It also changes the kind of business you build. Because we answer to patients and to our own doctors rather than to outside shareholders, we can take on practices that a pure-profit lens would walk past — including regional clinics at risk of closing. In 2022 we kept around a dozen of them open after their previous owner collapsed.

None of this means growth without discipline. Running 112+ clinics demands serious systems, governance, and capital. The point is simply that the capital can come in a form that funds the mission without diluting it. You can scale general practice and keep it in doctors’ hands. That’s the bet we’ve made — and so far, it’s paying off for the people who matter most: patients and the GPs who care for them.