What to Consider when Your Practice is Moving Location

When moving physical locations, one of the most important things to do is to register for a new provider number for that location. You do this via the Health Professional Online Service (HPOS).

You will also need to confirm with Medicare that this provider number is correctly linked to your Minor ID, which is your GEN number (e.g. GEN12345). Once you have the new provider number registered with Medicare, you will need to add it in via File > All User Preferences, double click on the relevant user, click into the Practice Sites tab and add the new practice site and provider number by clicking on the blue plus  icon.

If this is going to be the Doctor’s default location, you are able to select the Practice from the Default Site for which service? checkbox. For more information on this, review our Add a Site of Service article.

When moving to a new location, you may be getting new computers that require Genie to be freshly installed. Please refer to our guides on Replacing your Genie Server Computer and Configuring a Genie Client Computer for more information.

If you are not running the latest version of Genie, then please send through an email to our support desk (support@geniesolutions.com.au) detailing whether your clients and server machine are Mac or Windows and what version of Genie you are running so that we can provide you the relevant installer(s).

When moving locations, to ensure the correct address is pulled through in areas of Genie such as prescriptions and diagnostic requests, you will need to update your practice address. To update this, navigate to File > Practice Preferences, double click on your practice name, adjust the address in this window, then click the  button to update the preferences.

If the letterhead that appears on your invoices and receipts contains your address, you will need to modify your letterheads. If you have a single letterhead that you use on your invoices/receipts, first navigate to File > Practice Preferences, double click on your practice name and then click into the Practice Letterhead tab. Within this window you are able to modify your letterhead to include the new address.

If you have separate letterheads for each Doctor, and therefore have Use Individual Letterheads ticked in the Practice Letterhead tab, you will need to navigate to File > All User Preferences, double click on each doctor's name, click into their Correspondence tab and then adjust the letterhead in this window.

For further information on configuring letterheads, please refer to the article on Configuring Letterheads.

As each letter template in Genie is a separate document, they won’t update automatically once you update your letterhead within your Practice Preferences. As such, you will need to manually edit each letter template to update the practice information. The Customising Letter Templates article details how to edit both your Merged Letter and Referral Letter templates, should you need more guidance in this area.

You may wish to send out an announcement regarding your change of location. Please refer to the handy How to use Genie to get the word out article for more information.

If you send SMS reminders to your patients, you'll want to ensure that your messages aren't telling them to go to the wrong location. You can update the location information used in your messages (if applicable) by updating the names of your rooms in the Appointment Preferences window.

To do this, navigate to Appts > Appt Preferences > Column Order and Rooms. In the list on the right, double-click any rooms that should be updated to reflect your new location; this will allow you to edit the name and any other details of these, which will then be reflected in any future SMS reminders that use this information.