Going From Public to Private: The Digital Checklist Consultants Forget

Nobody hands you a map for this part.

When you leave a hospital or public role to go private, there is no shortage of people ready to help with the machinery. An accountant sets up the company and the ABN. A practice-setup consultant sorts the rooms, the lease, the provider numbers, the billing software, the indemnity cover. It is all necessary, and it is all handled with a competence that makes you feel looked after.

Then, somewhere in the first few weeks of seeing patients, a quieter problem surfaces. A GP wants to refer to you and can't find a website. A patient searches your name and lands on a hospital bio from three jobs ago, or on nothing at all. The rooms are booked, the shingle is up, and yet the digital front door, the thing every referrer and patient now reaches for first, simply isn't there.

BusyBeeDoc is doctor-founded, and this is the checklist that transition should come with. It is the part the consultants forget, ordered the way it actually needs to happen.

This is general information drawn from experience setting up in private practice, not legal, financial, or regulatory advice. Where privacy law or AHPRA advertising rules are involved, confirm the current guidance for your own circumstances before acting.

Why "just get a HotDoc listing" isn't the answer

The advice you'll hear most often is the cheapest one: get yourself listed on a directory and you're findable. It isn't wrong, exactly. It's just incomplete in a way that matters more the longer you practise.

A directory listing is rented space. The platform owns the URL, holds the patient data, sets the terms, and, this is the part that stings later, can place other practices right beside your name. You are a tenant on someone else's real estate, and the landlord's incentives are not the same as yours.

The distinction worth holding onto is own versus rent the patient relationship. A directory profile you rent. A website on your own domain, a Google Business Profile you've claimed, an enquiry that arrives in your own inbox: those you own. Rented channels are fine for discovery, and plenty of practices use them well. But if every path to you runs through a platform you don't control, you've built your practice on ground someone else can move.

Own at least one front door. Everything below is about building it, in the right order.

Start before you leave, not after

The single most common mistake is timing. Doctors treat the digital setup as something to do once they've gone private, after the resignation, once the rooms are confirmed, when there's finally a spare afternoon.

By then you're already invisible during the weeks that matter most. Websites take time for Google to find and rank. A Google Business Profile can take days to verify and longer to gain traction. Your name, if it's a common one, may already be half-claimed across the web. Every one of these assets rewards a head start and punishes a late one.

Aim to begin three to six months before your first private session. You don't need the practice fully built to secure the foundations. You need enough runway that when a referrer first goes looking for you, there's something to find.

The checklist, in order

Here's the sequence. Each step earns its place before the next.

1. Secure your name and your domain, first and early

Before anything else, claim the two things that are hardest to get back: your professional name and the web address that carries it.

Register a domain that reads cleanly as you or your practice: drjanesmith.com.au or northsidecardiology.com.au. The .com.au matters in Australia; it signals a local, registered business and it's what patients half-expect to type. Grab it even if the website is months away. Domains are cheap; the right one being taken is expensive. It's also worth registering the domain under your own name even if you're joining a group rather than starting solo. A shared practice bio page isn't a substitute, and it won't be yours to keep if you ever move on.

At the same time, check the obvious handles, meaning the practice name across Google, the main social platforms and the medical directories, so you're not forced into an awkward variant later. You're not committing to being active on all of them. You're just making sure the shelf is yours before someone else takes the spot.

2. Build a real website, not a profile alone

This is the one people underestimate. A directory profile is a listing; a website is a home. They are not substitutes, and a referring GP can feel the difference instantly.

A real website does what a listing never will: it holds your full scope of practice, your consulting locations and hours, how to refer, how to book, your fees or billing approach, and the practical detail a patient needs before a first appointment. It ranks for your name over time. And it's a surface you control, which means no competitor sits beside you and no platform changes the rules underneath you.

It doesn't need to be elaborate. It needs to be accurate, fast, clear, and built around the two people who use it: the patient deciding whether to see you and the GP deciding whether to refer. If you want the reasoning behind that in more depth, our guide on what actually works for online booking walks through why the booking flow on your own site tends to beat a bolted-on directory button. When we build a practice site, this structure is the part we design first, because it's the part that touches whether patients reach you at all. You can see how we approach it on our medical website design page.

3. Claim and complete your Google Business Profile

For a huge share of patients, the first interaction with your practice isn't your website. It's the Google panel that appears when they search your name. Claim it early, verify it, and fill it out properly.

The essentials: correct practice name, address, phone, hours, and category; a link to your website; and consulting locations that match reality. Consistency matters here. If your name, address, and phone number read differently across your website, your Google profile, and the directories, search engines lose confidence in all of them, and so do patients.

This is free, it's within your control, and it's often the difference between showing up cleanly in a local search and being a blank space where a competitor's panel sits instead.

4. Write an AHPRA-compliant bio and scope of practice

Now the words. Your bio and your description of what you do are advertising in AHPRA's eyes, and the rules apply the moment they're published.

Keep it factual. State your qualifications, training, experience, and genuine registration accurately. Describe the services you offer plainly. And steer clear of the traps: no testimonials about the clinical side of care, no superlatives like "best" or "leading", no guarantees of outcome, and careful use of protected titles, "specialist" and, since 2023, "surgeon", which you may only use where you hold the matching registration.

None of this makes for a thin page. A factual, well-organised bio is more persuasive to a referring GP than any inflated claim, and it's the version that stays out of trouble. If you'd like the full plain-English version of these rules, we wrote a plain-English guide to AHPRA advertising that goes through them properly. The authority is always AHPRA's current guidance for your profession.

5. Build your referral pathways for GPs

Here's the shift that catches new private practitioners off guard. In the public system, patients largely arrive through a triage or allocation process you never had to think about. In private practice, your referrers are your practice. A quiet week is usually a referral-pathway problem, not a marketing one.

So make referring to you effortless. On your website, give GPs a clear, dedicated path: how to refer, where to send the letter, a downloadable referral template or a secure upload, your provider details, and realistic timeframes for being seen. Make sure your consulting locations and contact details are unmistakable. A referrer who has to hunt for how to send you a patient will send that patient to whoever made it easy instead.

This is also where the digital setup stops being cosmetic and starts driving revenue. The website isn't a brochure; it's the machinery your referral network runs on.

6. Set up secure intake and enquiry forms, done properly

The moment your site collects a patient's name, phone number, symptoms, or a referral upload, you are handling personal and frequently health information. In Australia that brings you under the Privacy Act 1988 and the Australian Privacy Principles, and a plain email contact form usually isn't good enough for it.

What "properly" looks like, in practical terms:

• A clear consent and collection notice, telling the patient what you collect, why, and how it's handled, captured at the point of submission.
• Secure handling in transit and at rest, so enquiry detail isn't sitting in an unprotected inbox or spreadsheet.
• Australian data storage, keeping patient information onshore rather than routed through overseas servers by default.
• A retention approach: you don't keep sensitive detail indefinitely without a reason.

This is the part generic website builders and off-the-shelf form plugins tend to get wrong, because they were never designed with health information in mind. It's genuinely worth getting right from day one, both because it's the law and because it's the trust patients extend to you. This is general information, not legal advice. The authority is the OAIC's Privacy Act guidance, and it's worth confirming your setup against it.

7. Set a reviews strategy, inside the AHPRA lines

You will, understandably, want the good word to travel. It can, within limits that are easy to cross without meaning to.

AHPRA prohibits using testimonials about the clinical aspects of care in advertising. That means you must not solicit, re-share, or feature reviews that mention symptoms, diagnoses, treatments, or outcomes. A review saying a treatment "cured" something is a clinical testimonial and can't be used in your advertising, even if a patient left it freely.

What you can work with: feedback about non-clinical things, such as communication, the ease of booking, reception and wait times, isn't a testimonial and is generally fine. You're also not required to police unsolicited reviews on platforms you don't control, like Google; the line is that you can't turn a clinical one into advertising by re-sharing it. A simple, compliant approach is to make leaving genuine feedback easy and to never script or solicit the clinical detail. Check current AHPRA guidance before you formalise anything here.

Putting it in sequence

If it helps to see the whole thing as one ordered list:

1. Secure your name and .com.au domain, first and months ahead.
2. Build a real website you own, not a directory profile alone.
3. Claim and complete your Google Business Profile.
4. Write an AHPRA-compliant bio and scope of practice.
5. Build clear referral pathways for GPs into the site.
6. Set up secure, Privacy Act-appropriate intake forms with Australian data handling.
7. Set a reviews strategy that stays inside AHPRA's testimonial rules.

Notice that the expensive-to-fix items sit at the top. A domain you didn't secure, a name someone else claimed, a website that had no runway to rank: those are the ones that cost you during the exact window when referrers and patients first come looking. The order isn't arbitrary; it front-loads the things time makes harder.

The moment this matters most

Leaving your public role is the acquisition moment for your own practice. It's the point at which patients and referrers start, for the first time, trying to find you rather than the institution you sat behind. Whatever they find, or don't, in those weeks sets the trajectory.

Your accountant and your practice consultant will get you a company, a lease, and a billing system. What they typically won't get you is the digital front door that decides whether any of that machinery ever sees a patient. That part is yours to own, and it rewards starting early far more than it rewards starting elaborate.

If you'd like a website built around this checklist, one you own, structured for referrers, and set up to handle patient enquiries the way the Privacy Act expects, start your build with us and we'll map it before you've left your public role. Or read more about how we approach medical website design, and where a straightforward build lands on pricing.

Go private with the front door already open. It's a far better feeling than building it while the patients are already knocking.