An Outside Look at Medi-Chi: How the App Actually Gets Used in a Working Clinic

About this piece. This is an editorial walkthrough of the Medi-Chi app written from an outside-in perspective, following an illustrative composite of a clinic day. It is not a patient testimonial and makes no claims about treatment outcomes. Clinical decisions always rest with the registered practitioner.

Starting where the day starts

Most software written for acupuncture clinics begins at the note. Medi-Chi begins earlier than that — at the point where somebody finds a practitioner and asks for a time.

A practitioner with a published Medi-Chi profile gets a public page of their own: clinic name, suburb, registration details, the services they offer and what each one costs. A visitor can land on that page, pick a service, leave their details and pay — no account, no app download, nothing to install. The money goes to the clinic's own payment account, not into a holding pool somewhere. Medi-Chi takes a flat A$0.88 per successful payment and nothing else; the card processing fee is the clinic's normal rate with their payment provider.

That detail matters more than it sounds. A lot of booking platforms take a percentage, which quietly scales with the size of the practice. A flat 88 cents on a A$120 consultation is under one per cent, and it stays 88 cents whether the appointment is A$60 or A$180.

Through the consultation

Once the patient is in the room, the app shifts from admin to clinical reference.

The four pillars, structured. Medi-Chi has a guided intake that walks through the standard diagnostic sequence — looking, hearing and smelling, asking, palpating — with pulse positions mapped to the organs they report on and tongue findings recorded as structured fields rather than a paragraph of free text. A practitioner can photograph a tongue and have it read as part of the record.

Pattern differentiation with its working shown. This is the part the app is really built around. Feed it the presentation and it returns a pattern differentiation, a point prescription and treatment reasoning — but the reasoning is referenced back to named classical sources. Sù Wèn, Líng Shū, Shāng Hán Lùn and the rest are cited by name, not paraphrased into anonymous mush. A practitioner who disagrees can see why the suggestion was made and argue with it on its own terms.

Fourteen styles, side by side. Rather than picking one lineage and pretending it is the only one, Medi-Chi can present the same case through different treatment styles — Balance Method, Sa'am, Master Tung, Jīn's Three Needle, auricular, horary approaches and others — and compare them. For a practitioner trained in one school who is curious about another, it is a genuinely useful teaching surface.

Points and herbs, free to look up. The acupuncture point and herb references are not behind the paywall. Location, needling depth and angle, cautions, contraindications — all of it is open to anyone. The paid tier covers the reasoning engine and the documentation tools, not the reference material.

After the patient leaves

The paperwork is where most of the unpaid hours in a clinic disappear, and it is where Medi-Chi adds the most time back.

• Patient handouts generate straight from the session — lifestyle notes, dietary guidance, self-care points — in plain language, print-formatted, with the clinic's own details on them.
• Case reports can be assembled against a proper standard (CARE and STRICTA with integrative additions), which makes the difference between a note in a drawer and something publishable.
• Exports come out as PDF or Word, watermark-free for subscribers, carrying the practitioner's own credentials.
• Patient records carry history forward, including VAS scores tracked over a course of treatment.

Case reports finalised in the app note that they were prepared using Medi-Chi and carry the practitioner's credentials. Medi-Chi claims no authorship of the clinical content — the work belongs to whoever did it.

The extras people do not expect

A few things sit in the subscription that are not obvious from the outside.

The library. Annual subscribers get the Modern Nèi Jīng and the rest of the book catalogue included. For anyone who was going to buy a translation anyway, that closes a meaningful chunk of the subscription cost on its own.

Ten languages. The interface and the generated content translate, with pulse qualities and point names holding their Chinese characters and Pinyin rather than being flattened into English approximations. For a clinic seeing patients who read Chinese, that is not cosmetic.

Offline access. Recent diagnoses cache on the device, so a dropped connection mid-consultation does not take the record with it.

Research tools. Subscribers get evidence lookups with verified citations, a resource library of checked references, and reverse-diagnosis — working backwards from a Western diagnosis to the TCM patterns that commonly present with it.

Student and educator tiers. Verified students at recognised colleges get their own annual plan, and educators can run cohorts with join codes, assignment portals and an optional marking rubric.

Where the limits sit

An honest walkthrough has to say what the app does not do.

It does not diagnose patients. It produces a structured suggestion for a registered practitioner to accept, edit or throw out, and the practitioner carries the clinical and legal responsibility for what happens next. It makes no outcome promises, and it is not a substitute for medical care.

The AI credential checks on new practitioner applications are advisory. Registration numbers are checked against the official register, but a human still approves every account.

And clinics taking card payments hold their own payment account. That means the clinic — not Medi-Chi — is responsible for refunds and for resolving any dispute with their patient. Medi-Chi passes the payment through and takes its 88 cents.

The shape of the thing

What Medi-Chi is, once you have watched it through a full day, is a bridge between three jobs that normally need three separate tools: getting patients in the door and paid for, thinking clearly about the case with the classics in reach, and producing documentation that stands up outside the clinic.

None of those is revolutionary on its own. Having them in one place, in one record, referenced back to the source texts and priced at a flat 88 cents a transaction, is a reasonable argument for a look.

Reference material is open to anyone at medichi.online. The decision-support tools sit behind a subscription, with a seven-day trial that does not ask for a card.