By Bert Pruim, CEO, Xestro

It was January 2000. Derek Gower flew over from Hamilton, New Zealand, to install VIP 2000 in my dermatology practice in Darwin. He came himself. That tells you everything about the man and the business he had built: a highly configurable, genuinely specialist-focused practice management system, created and supported from a small city in New Zealand, with a growing footprint across Australia. The fact that he got on a plane to Darwin says something about his commitment to his clients.

I used VIP for the next 18 years. About a decade ago, Derek sold it to Best Practice Software. I understood the decision, as Best Practice had the scale to take VIP further than a founder-led operation from Hamilton ever could. But there is always something bittersweet about watching a founder hand over their brainchild.

So when I heard that Best Practice Software has notified Bp VIP.net clients that the platform will be deprecated by June 2027, I sat with that for a moment. Honestly, I felt sad. Derek built something that served Australian specialists well for more than two decades, and it deserves more than a footnote.

What made VIP special

VIP was built for ophthalmologists first. Derek and his team had originally developed it to support Hamilton Eye Clinic, directly across the road from their offices in Hamilton. It was then generalised across ophthalmology in New Zealand and Australia, and from there into other specialties, including my own, dermatology. The ophthalmology DNA was always there, and it showed.

I would argue, and most who used it seriously would agree, that in its heyday VIP was the most configurable on-premise practice management and clinical records platform in Australia, certainly more so than its bigger on-premise specialist competitor at the time. That configurability was Derek’s signature, and it is what made VIP genuinely hard to walk away from. Ophthalmology practices, in particular, built deep, bespoke workflows around it, including free-text ophthalmic history and a coherent clinical picture carried from consult to consult. I hear from ophthalmologist colleagues who are genuinely worried about what losing that means. That concern is legitimate, and it is one we have considered carefully at Xestro.

Why I started building Xestro in 2012

By 2012, I was still using VIP every day, but it was already obvious that on-premise systems, even very good ones, were going to struggle to keep pace. That has clearly been borne out. VIP’s deprecation is not an isolated event. I believe it is the beginning of an inevitable and imminent end-of-life for specialist-focused platforms that depend on on-premise or hosted-server architecture in Australia. The architecture is simply on the wrong side of history.

So I started building. One developer, and me. The ambition was straightforward: a cloud-native platform for Australian private medical specialists that was non-inferior to VIP in every clinical respect, and then capable of doing things VIP never could. It took six years. We went live in 2018, and my own multidisciplinary practice migrated across that year. We were not abandoning VIP so much as carrying forward what it had built, in an architecture fit for the next two decades.

Today, Xestro supports more than 4,500 specialist medical practitioners across more than 3,600 practice locations in every state of Australia, serving the full breadth of private medical specialties, from ophthalmology to psychiatry, and from paediatrics to obstetrics. We have grown to a team of 40, based entirely on the Sunshine Coast in Queensland, with no remote workers and no outsourcing. I still practise as a dermatologist, albeit now very part-time, and I use Xestro in my consulting rooms every week. That matters to me, and it influences how we build.

The natural progression

The practices that chose VIP did so because it was the best available for the way they worked: comprehensive, deeply configurable, and built with procedurally focused specialists in mind. These practices are now being asked to make a new decision. Client feedback and our continued growth tell the same story: Xestro is now the most comprehensive and configurable cloud-based practice management platform in Australia, supporting a broader range of specialties, configuration options, and integrated workflows than any comparable cloud offering. It is not the same product as VIP, nor the same architecture, but it is built on the same philosophy: by doctors, for doctors. For those of us who built Xestro out of lived experience with VIP, this is the natural progression of the same idea.

If you are a VIP user facing this transition

June 2027 may sound like a long way off. It is not, particularly when you consider what migrating a specialist practice actually involves: evaluating options, extracting years of patient data, reconfiguring established clinical workflows, and retraining staff, all without disrupting a practice running on tight margins and schedules. Start earlier than you think you need to.

Your data is not stranded. Xestro’s onboarding team manages data conversion directly from VIP, including user-defined fields, financial history, and clinical records. The years invested in your VIP configuration are not lost. Our onboarding team has done this many times and understands the VIP platform in depth.

Xestro was built cloud-native from day one (architected for the cloud as a single, continuously updated multi-tenant service that scales on demand, reached through a web browser with nothing installed or maintained at the practice). There is no on-site server to buy, house, or replace, and no separate hardware or IT support contract bundled into the cost of running it.

If you would like to see what Xestro looks like for your specialty and workflows, including XScribe, our native AI scribe built directly into the platform, I would welcome the conversation.

To Derek Gower and everyone who built and maintained VIP over more than two decades, thank you. The software you created was central to my practice for 18 years, and I am genuinely grateful for that. You set a standard that shaped how I think about specialist software, and ultimately why I built Xestro. We have taken on that mantle and take that responsibility seriously. We look forward to welcoming any VIP practice making the move to a best-in-class, cloud-native alternative.

Bert Pruim is CEO of Xestro and a practising dermatologist. He has used Xestro in his own practice since 2018, following nearly 18 years on VIP.

Learn More About Xestro

If you would like to see how Xestro supports specialist practices through a secure, cloud based practice management platform, you can book a free personalised demo with our team.

Book a demo here:
https://xestro.com/contact-us/

If you are already using Xestro and want to build confidence with the system, explore our training options. Our sessions are designed to help practices use Xestro effectively and with confidence.

View training here:
https://xestro.com/training/

You can also follow Xestro on LinkedIn to stay up to date with company milestones, partnerships, events, and industry insights throughout the year.

View our LinkedIn page here:
https://www.linkedin.com/company/xestro/