Medi-Chi for Australian Acupuncturists: Support at Home, WorkCover, AHPRA-Ready Notes

Australian acupuncture is in an unusual moment. Medicare still excludes almost all TCM services, WorkCover coverage varies by state, and from 1 July 2025 the new Support at Home program is quietly making acupuncture a viable allied-health option inside older Australians' care plans. That is a lot of paperwork for a solo clinic.

Medi-Chi is built by an AHPRA-registered Chinese medicine practitioner (Derek Doran, CMR0002211465) [1] for the Australians who are actually doing this work. This is what your practitioner subscription unlocks specifically for the local market.

Support at Home — the paperwork, sorted

From 1 July 2025, Support at Home replaced Home Care Packages and short-term restorative care [2]. Acupuncture sits inside the allied-health / therapeutic services budget — no separate approval, but the care manager needs to see the plan, the goals, and the evidence in one page.

On the Practitioner Resources page (behind the same paywall as the rest of the practitioner tools), you'll find:

• Aged Care Care-Manager One-Pager (fillable v11) — patient contacts, consent, 30-second pitch, plan, escalation script, printed-by and case-ref footer, and a lockable Completed-on date. Fits on one A4 page in every PDF reader.
• Bilingual version — English + Simplified Chinese, for CALD clients and family conferences.
• Print-only version — for facilities with no laptop at the desk.
• Pre-visit checklist — AHPRA / PI insurance, approved-provider ABN, service agreement, progress-note cadence.

All of it prints cleanly, all of it saves the fields back into the PDF so you can email or file it. No fiddling with Word templates.

WorkCover and CTP — notes insurers actually accept

Workers' compensation in Australia is a patchwork — WorkSafe Victoria, icare/SIRA in NSW, WorkCover Queensland, ReturnToWorkSA, WorkCover WA, WorkSafe Tasmania, MAIL/TIO in the NT, and CTP schemes on top [3]. The one thing every scheme agrees on is that they want structured, dated, goal-linked notes.

Medi-Chi's diagnosis output and clinical handouts are structured around subjective / objective / assessment / plan with explicit goals and re-assessment dates. That formatting drops straight into a WorkCover or CTP progress report. A dedicated WorkCover intake one-pager is next up on the Practitioner Resources roadmap for Australian subscribers.

For background on why WorkCover is worth the setup effort, see the deep-dive at WorkCover Acupuncture in Australia — State-by-State Guide.

Medicare, honestly

Medicare doesn't fund most acupuncture in Australia. That is unlikely to change soon. What Medi-Chi does is help you extract the referrals and paperwork that adjacent MBS items can fund — GP Chronic Disease Management Plans, Team Care Arrangements, allied-health referrals — with wording your patient's GP will recognise. See Medicare and Acupuncture in Australia for the current state of play.

The 14-style diagnosis engine

Australian acupuncture graduates come out of RMIT, Endeavour, SSNT, Torrens, and UTS with different lineage exposure — some heavy TCM, some Five Element, some Japanese meridian therapy. Medi-Chi's diagnosis engine speaks all of them: standard TCM, Five Element, Stems & Branches, Saam, Master Tung, Dr Tan balance method, Japanese, Korean, Sasang, auricular, esoteric, sacred geometry, and horary (Ling Gui Ba Fa). Enter symptoms once, compare two styles side by side.

Every output cites the classical source — Sù Wèn, Líng Shū, Shāng Hán Lùn, Jīn Guì Yào Lüè — so you can defend the reasoning at a peer-review or a coroner's request. That is intentional.

AHPRA-advertising compliant by default

The Chinese Medicine Board of Australia codes and guidelines prohibit testimonials, outcome claims, and gift/discount inducements in health-service advertising [4]. Medi-Chi is designed against that ruleset:

• No patient testimonials or star ratings anywhere in the platform
• No outcome claims in AI output — every diagnosis is flagged as clinical decision support, not medical diagnosis
• Practitioner public profiles (example) built to the same standard, so if a patient finds you through Medi-Chi you're not accidentally in breach
• Restricted herbs (Ephedra, Aconite) never appear in AI-generated formulas — TGA-compliant substitutions are used

That is the default. You can't turn compliance off, and that is the point.

Practice management, quietly

• Patient profiles with VAS history — track pain scores across sessions with editable charts
• Saved cases — pin returning patients, tag by pattern, annotate for supervision
• Google Calendar sync — appointments in Medi-Chi drop into your Google Calendar with two-way sync
• Stripe Connect payments — take card payments at the clinic, patient keeps the receipt, you keep the payout, all under your ABN
• Tongue diagnosis — phone photo, colour and coating extracted for your file
• Offline access — the last 200 records cache to your device for house calls and aged-care visits with no signal

Data lives in Australia

Managed cloud infrastructure with row-level security on every table — you only ever see your own patient data. Guest mode lets you run a case with no identifiers at all for supervision or teaching. All patient-identifying fields are handled under health-privacy safeguards aligned with the Australian Privacy Principles.

What it costs

Seven-day free trial, no card required. After that a monthly or annual subscription unlocks continued access, with the Modern Nèi Jīng commentary included on annual plans. Full detail on the Practitioner Pricing page.

There's also a 7-day automated cooling-off refund if you sign up and change your mind — one click from the Subscription page.

The short version

If you're an AHPRA-registered acupuncturist working across aged care, WorkCover, private billing, and everything in between — and you're tired of stitching your paperwork together from five different templates — Medi-Chi puts it in one place.

Start the trial or download a sample one-pager from the Practitioner Resources page to see the format first.

Related reading

• Aged Care Acupuncture in Australia — Support at Home from July 2025
• WorkCover Acupuncture in Australia — State-by-State Guide
• Medicare and Acupuncture in Australia — Where TCM Stands
• Six Foundations of Real Health — Australian Lifestyle-Medicine Primer