For doctors
Practice software for South African doctors
A general practice runs on two things that most software treats as unrelated: the clinical reasoning inside the consultation, and the claim that pays for it. iScript.live puts them in the same record.
Or talk to us first- POPIA & HPCSA aligned
- We take medical aids
- Built by practising clinicians
HPCSA board
Medical and Dental
In short
iScript.live is a South African practice platform for doctors that combines the clinical record, structured consultation workflow, e-prescribing, telehealth and real-time medical-scheme claim switching in one system. It is built around the consultation rather than the invoice. It runs today in independent, dispensing and multi-site general practices, with claims submitted through MediKredit and pathology returned from Ampath as discrete results.
iScript.live is a multi-tenant, AI-native healthcare practice platform built in South Africa by Lighthouse iScript (Pty) Ltd. This page is about what iScript.live does for doctors practising in South Africa. Doctors in South Africa are regulated by the Health Professions Council of South Africa under the Health Professions Act 56 of 1974, through its Professional Board for Medical and Dental.
A doctor in South Africa diagnoses and treats illness, prescribes medicines, refers to specialists and other disciplines, and carries clinical responsibility for the patients on their list. General practice is usually the first point of contact with the health system and the place chronic disease is managed over years rather than visits.
This page covers what iScript.live does for a general or family practice: the consultation itself, prescribing and dispensing, pathology, medical-scheme claiming, and the record that has to hold all four together.
At a glance
- Platform
- iScript.live, built by Lighthouse iScript (Pty) Ltd
- Profession this page is about
- Doctors
- Regulating council
- Health Professions Council of South Africa
- Governing statute
- Health Professions Act 56 of 1974
- Professional board
- Medical and Dental
- Country of practice
- South Africa
No registration-number prefix is published here. It could not be verified against an authoritative source, and a wrong one would be worse than none.
What actually gets in the way
Where the day goes in doctors' practice
None of this is a software problem in the abstract. Each of these is an hour, a rejected claim or a clinical decision made with less information than it deserved.
The note and the claim are two separate jobs
You write the consultation, then you translate it into ICD-10 and tariff codes a second time so the account can go out. The same clinical fact is captured twice, by hand, at the end of a full day.
Rejections arrive weeks after the patient has gone
An item-level rejection on a claim submitted a fortnight ago means reopening a consultation you no longer remember, finding the coding error, and resubmitting — while the cash sits outside the practice.
Results land as attachments, not as data
A pathology report as a PDF cannot be trended, cannot raise an alert and cannot be reasoned over. You find the abnormal creatinine because you happened to open the file.
Benefit uncertainty at the front desk
Nobody knows whether the member is in benefit until the claim is rejected, so the practice either carries the risk or asks the patient for cash it may have to refund.
Chronic patients are managed one visit at a time
Between appointments there is no signal. A hypertensive patient's trajectory exists only as a series of readings taken in your rooms, months apart.
Scripts, dispensing and stock live in three places
The script is written in one system, the dispense recorded in another, and the stock count reconstructed at month end from whatever the shelf says.
A day in the practice
What a working day looks like on iScript.live
Not a feature list. This is the same day a general practice already has, with the duplicated work taken out of it.
Before the first patient
The day's list already knows who is in benefit
Reception works down the appointment list confirming member and benefit eligibility against the scheme before anybody sits down, so the conversation about payment happens at the front desk rather than six weeks later in a rejection report.
LiveIn the room
You work through a template, not a blank note
History, examination, assessment and plan are fields rather than a paragraph. The diagnosis you record is an ICD-10 concept from the moment you record it, so nothing has to be translated into codes afterwards by somebody reading your note.
LiveStill in the room
Script, dispense and pathology request leave from the record
The prescription is electronic and compliant. If you dispense, the items come off stock and post to the ledger as you dispense them. A pathology request goes out from the same screen and comes back to the same patient.
LiveAs the patient leaves
The claim goes out while the detail is still true
Coding is validated against the tariff and ICD-10 libraries before transmission, the claim is submitted in real time, and any item-level rejection comes back attached to the consultation rather than to a printed report.
LiveMid-afternoon
An abnormal result finds you
Ampath results arrive as discrete values with units and reference ranges. A poller checks every thirty minutes and an abnormal flag raises a task, so the out-of-range creatinine is brought to you rather than discovered when somebody happens to open the file.
LiveEnd of day
There is no second shift
The billing that used to happen after the last patient has already happened, because it was a consequence of the consultation rather than a separate task performed from memory.
Between visits
Chronic patients stop going quiet
Remote monitoring on cellular-first devices is in development, and is designed so a hypertensive or diabetic patient's trajectory exists between appointments instead of only inside them.
In development
What you get, and what is still being built
The platform, read from your side of the desk
6 of these 8 capabilities are in production today. The rest are labelled with the same status we publish on the roadmap, because a status label is the one thing a clinician should never have to interpret.
The consultation becomes structured data
28 structured clinical consultation templates and 12 condition templates, so history, examination, assessment and plan are captured as fields rather than as free text attached to an invoice. Coding is derived from what you recorded, not retyped from it.
Structured consultation workflow
Benefit check before, claim after
MediKredit doctor integration to XML specification 3.53 over certificate-based mutual TLS. Member and benefit eligibility before the consultation, claim submission at the end of it, and item-level rejection reasons, reversals and electronic remittance advice in the same screen.
Real-time medical-scheme claim switching
Ampath results as discrete values
Seven live endpoints parsing XML and PDF into discrete values with units and reference ranges. A results poller runs every 30 minutes and abnormal flags raise a clinician task automatically, so an out-of-range result is not waiting in an inbox.
Bidirectional pathology
Coding validated before transmission
A billing tariff library of 25 798 codes including NAPPI, and the full ICD-10 Master Industry Table, with validation edits applied before the claim leaves the practice rather than after the scheme has rejected it.
Coding and tariff intelligence
Telehealth with the record in frame
Low-latency video consultations with clinical context beside the video rather than in another tab, compliant electronic prescriptions, WhatsApp Business API messaging to patients, voice over IP and card payment collection.
Telehealth, e-prescribing and messaging
One record across every site you run
A production data model of more than 150 entities with row-level tenant isolation. A six-site group and a single consulting room run the same code, with shared patient records inside the group and no shared data between practices.
Multi-tenant clinical core
Decision support calibrated for South Africa
A four-stage engine designed to run during the consultation: concept extraction from free text and dictation, contextual differential diagnosis combining probabilistic models with a deterministic rule layer encoding South African standard treatment guidelines, risk stratification, and a management plan cross-referenced to CMS Prescribed Minimum Benefit pairs and the Chronic Disease List.
Clinical decision-support engine
Chronic care between the visits
Cellular-first remote monitoring on Transtek blood-pressure monitors, glucose meters, scales and pulse oximeters with AnyHub gateways, so a patient does not need a smartphone. Per-patient alert thresholds and chronic-benefit billing integration.
Remote patient monitoring for chronic care
Built today, or being built
What is live, and what is not, in one table
The same list as the cards above, in the form a sceptical reader wants it. Every status in the right-hand column is resolved from the platform roadmap at the moment this page renders. None of it is typed by hand.
| Capability | Platform capability it comes from | Status |
|---|---|---|
| The consultation becomes structured data | Structured consultation workflow | Live |
| Benefit check before, claim after | Real-time medical-scheme claim switching | Live |
| Ampath results as discrete values | Bidirectional pathology | Live |
| Coding validated before transmission | Coding and tariff intelligence | Live |
| Telehealth with the record in frame | Telehealth, e-prescribing and messaging | Live |
| One record across every site you run | Multi-tenant clinical core | Live |
| Decision support calibrated for South Africa | Clinical decision-support engine | In development |
| Chronic care between the visits | Remote patient monitoring for chronic care | In development |
6 of these 8 capabilities are in production today, and 2 are in development. Anything in development is not available to buy, is not in a beta programme, and should not be counted on when you make a decision.
Why this is different
The claim is a consequence of the consultation, not a parallel exercise
South African practice software is very good at medical accounting and electronic claim switching, because that is what it was designed for in the 1980s. The cost of that architecture is that the clinical encounter became an unstructured note attached to an invoice. iScript.live inverts it: the encounter is the primary object, and the claim, the script, the stock movement and the ledger entry all fall out of it.
- One capture, many consumers — the claim, the care plan, the ledger and the intelligence layer all read the same structured fact.
- Row-level cryptographic isolation between tenants, so multi-site groups and single rooms run the same code safely.
- Every clinical artefact carries provenance: who recorded it, when, on what device, and against which consent.
What it replaces
What actually comes out of the practice
Most South African general practices are not replacing one system. They are replacing a system plus the manual work that grew around it.
| What a practice runs today | What it becomes |
|---|---|
| A medical-accounting and switching package, with a free-text clinical note added to it later | A structured clinical record from which the claim, the script, the stock movement and the ledger entry are derived |
| Paper scripts, a script book, and a dispensing register reconciled by hand | Electronic prescribing inside the consultation, with dispensed items moving stock and posting to the general ledgerLive |
| A spreadsheet of rejected claims worked through weekly | Item-level rejection reasons, reversals and remittance advice attached to the claim they belong toLive |
| Pathology reports as PDFs in an email inbox or a filing tray | Discrete results with units and reference ranges, trendable, with abnormal flags raising a taskLive |
| A WhatsApp number on somebody's personal phone | WhatsApp Business API messaging from the practice, against the patient recordLive |
| A month-end stock count that explains last month | Inventory that moves at the point of dispensing, so variance is visible while it can still be explained |
Nothing above requires the outgoing system to be switched off first. Practices generally keep it readable while they work live here.
Billing and medical schemes
How doctors actually get paid
General practice is one of the few disciplines in South Africa where scheme billing is genuinely routine, and where cash and self-pay volume sits alongside it in the same day.
The platform submits claims to medical schemes through MediKredit over certificate-based mutual TLS to XML specification 3.53. Member and benefit eligibility can be confirmed before the consultation. Submission happens at the end of it. Item-level rejection reasons, reversals and electronic remittance advice come back into the same record, against the claim they belong to.
What any particular practice may bill any particular scheme is not a function of software. It depends on the practitioner's registration category, the practice code number issued for the practice, and the individual scheme's rules and benefit design. The platform gives you the mechanics and the validation; the entitlement question belongs to the scheme and the register.
Cash, self-pay and part-payment are first-class rather than an exception. Card payment collection is live, a patient can be their own debtor, and a mixed account where the scheme pays part and the patient pays the rest is a normal case rather than a workaround.
Industry first-pass rejection runs between 8% and 15%, which is what stretches a practice's billing cycle from a fortnight to two months. Pre-adjudication targets below 1.5% and is in development, not live.
The billing mechanics, and their status
- Eligibility before the consultation
- Live, through MediKredit.
- Real-time claim submission
- Live, through MediKredit.
- Item-level rejection handling and reversals
- Live.
- Electronic remittance advice matching
- Live.
- Pre-transmission coding validation
- Live, against the tariff and ICD-10 libraries.
- Full claim-integrity pre-adjudication
- In development. Not live.
Who else touches it
Who else in the practice uses this, and what they can see
A practice is not one person, and a clinical record that only the clinician can reach is a record somebody else will keep a second copy of. Roles are configured by the practice, not assumed by the platform, and every role is scoped at row level.
| Role | What they do, and what they can see |
|---|---|
| The practitioner | Consults, records, prescribes where the registration allows it, and submits. Sees the full clinical record for patients within the practice. |
| Reception and front desk | Books, checks members in, confirms eligibility before the appointment and takes payment. Sees the demographic, appointment and account layers, not the clinical note. |
| Billing and accounts | Works claims, item-level rejections, reversals and remittance advice, and reconciles what was paid against what was submitted. Sees coded lines, not free-text clinical content. |
| Practice manager or owner | Configures the practice, the sites, the fees, the templates and who may do what. Sees activity and financial reporting across every site in the group. |
| A supervisor, where the registration requires one | Countersigns and reviews the work of a practitioner practising under supervision, against the same record rather than a printed copy of it. |
| An assistant, associate or locum | Joins the practice as a provider rather than as a shared login, so their activity is attributable to them and ends when their association does. |
Every read, write and export carries the actor, the timestamp and the reason, so who saw what is answerable rather than reconstructed.
Getting started
From registration to a working practice, and what moving across involves
Onboarding is measured in days rather than in an implementation project. Nothing here requires a server, a site visit or a consultant. Migrating history is the separate question, and it is answered below rather than skipped.
Standing the practice up
01
Register the practice
You complete a short online registration and receive your own tenant with your practice name, branding and subdomain. No implementation project, no server, no site visit.
02
Configure claims and codes
Your practice code number, switching bureau and medical-scheme details are captured during registration. The tariff and ICD-10 libraries are already loaded, so the first claim can go out on day one.
03
Consult in structure
You work through a consultation template rather than a blank note. Diagnosis, procedure and dispensed items carry their codes with them into the claim and into the ledger.
04
Submit, reconcile, watch the trend
The claim is validated and transmitted in real time, remittance advice is matched against it automatically, and results and readings accumulate against the patient as a trend rather than as a folder.
Moving off your current system
Moving practice software is the part everybody underestimates, so it is worth being exact about what is quick and what is not. Standing the practice up, as set out above, is quick. Bringing a decade of history across is not, and is scoped as its own piece of work.
Step 1
Run in parallel for a short period
Most practices keep the outgoing system readable while they work live in the new one, rather than attempting a hard cut-over on a Monday morning. Nothing about the platform requires the old system to be switched off first.
Step 2
Bring patients across
Patient demographics, medical-aid details and balances import first, because those are what reception needs on day one. Clinical history follows, and how much of it comes across as structured data rather than as attached documents depends entirely on what the outgoing system will export.
Step 3
Move the money last
Open claims and outstanding debtors are the last thing to move, and usually the cleanest approach is to finish the claim cycle already in flight on the old system while new work starts on the new one.
Historic-data migration is quoted separately from the platform, because its length is a property of the outgoing system rather than of this one. A practice that exports well is a short piece of work. A practice whose history exists only as scanned paper is a decision about how much of it is worth carrying.
Regulation, record-keeping and compliance
What the record has to survive
Clinical software carries the most sensitive data a person has, and a regulator will eventually read what it produced. Compliance is designed into the platform rather than certified around it afterwards.
Registration authority
Professional Board for Medical and Dental
Health Professions Council of South Africa, under the Health Professions Act 56 of 1974.
Keeping of patient records
iScript.live is aligned to HPCSA guidance on the keeping of patient records and on telemedicine, with an immutable audit trail on every clinical artefact recording actor, timestamp and reason on each read, write and export.
POPIA
Lawful processing, consent records, data residency and subject-access handling are built into the platform rather than kept in a separate register. Consent captured in the consultation is part of the clinical record.
Scope and delegation
Role-based access and scope enforcement mean a practice nurse, a clinical associate and a principal doctor see and may do different things in the same record. What each role may do is configured by the practice, not assumed by us.
Interoperability and coding standards
HL7 FHIR, the ICD-10 Master Industry Table, CMS Prescribed Minimum Benefits, BHF practice-code numbering and NAPPI.
The record has to be attributable
Every clinical entry carries who made it, when, and against which consent, on an immutable audit trail. An entry that is later corrected shows as a correction rather than replacing what was there, because a record that can be silently rewritten is not evidence of anything.
The record has to be retrievable years later
Clinical records outlive software, staff and sometimes practices. Records are held as structured data with their coding intact and are exportable, so the practice is not dependent on this platform continuing to exist in order to read its own history. Statutory retention periods are set by the regulator and the relevant legislation, not by us, and are not restated on this page.
Consent is part of the record, not a filing cabinet
Consent to treat, consent to a remote consultation and consent to share are captured in the consultation and stored against it, so the consent that applied at the time is retrievable with the entry it applied to.
Prescribing and dispensing leave a trail
A script written and an item dispensed are both part of the clinical record and both attributable to the practitioner who authorised them, rather than living in a separate register that has to be reconciled to the notes.
Delegation is enforced, not assumed
A practice nurse, a clinical associate and a principal doctor can work in the same patient record and be able to do different things in it. What each role may do is configured by the practice, because scope is a matter for the registration and the practice, not for the software vendor.
What it costs
How this is priced, and what the quote depends on
The clinical platform is free, on every seat, permanently. You pay only for the medical claims you submit — at a rate that falls as you add modules — and optionally for the two business modules themselves. Every figure is published below rather than quoted on request.
01
CORE — the clinical platform, R0
The record, the diary, the billing, the claims workflow and the AI documentation, on every seat, at no cost and with no expiry. Not a trial and not a cut-down edition. Claims are R9.95 each on CORE, and that is the only charge.
02
R9.95, R8.95 or R7.95 per claim submitted
You pay for claims you actually send, from prepaid credits that never expire. The rate falls as you move up: R9.95 on CORE, R8.95 on STRIDE with one module, R7.95 on SUMMIT with both. Never a percentage of what the claim is worth, and never a percentage of what you earn.
03
STRIDE R699 a module, SUMMIT R1 199 for both
Website and Finance are optional business modules. They do not make you a better practitioner; they make you a better business, and they lower your per-claim rate while they are on. Neither is required to practise on the platform.
What the quote turns on
- How many medical-scheme claims you actually submit in a month — that is the only usage-based charge there is.
- Whether you want the Website module, the Finance module, both, or neither — which also sets your per-claim rate: R9.95 on CORE, R8.95 on STRIDE, R7.95 on SUMMIT.
- Nothing else. Seats are free, sites are free, storage is free, and support is not a tier.
- Migrating historic patient data from an outgoing system is scoped separately and quoted before any work starts.
- Nothing here is indexed to your turnover, your collections or the value of your claims.
For doctors specifically
General practices most often land on either the per-clinician model or, where claim volume is still building, the per-claim model. A dispensing practice should raise dispensing early, because inventory and general-ledger posting are part of the scope conversation.
Every price on this site is published, not quoted. We never charge a percentage of what you earn. Registering a practice does not commit you to a contract.
Ask for a quote for your practiceObjections
The reasons not to do this, answered
Every one of these has been said to us by a practitioner in this profession or one adjacent to it. Where the answer is no, it says no.
I have fifteen years of patient history. I am not starting again.
Nor should you. Demographics, medical-aid details and balances import first because that is what reception needs on day one, and clinical history follows. How much of it arrives as structured data rather than as attached documents is determined by what your current system will export, which is why migration is scoped and quoted separately rather than promised as a fixed piece of work.
My billing works. I do not want to risk the practice's cash flow.
This is the right objection to have. The usual approach is to finish the claim cycle already in flight on the outgoing system while new consultations start here, so no claim is mid-air during a cut-over. The outgoing system stays readable throughout.
Structured templates will slow me down. I type faster than I click.
For a straightforward upper respiratory tract infection, a template is slower than a sentence. The time comes back at the end of the day, because the coding, the claim and the account do not have to be reconstructed from that sentence by somebody else. Free text is still there when a case does not fit a template.
Is the decision support actually working, or is it a slide?
It is in development and it is not live, and the page says so on every card that mentions it. What is live today is the structured record it will eventually reason over. We publish the roadmap and the reality as separate lists on purpose.
In developmentMy practice is one room and me. This looks built for groups.
A single consulting room and a six-site group run the same code. The difference is configuration, not edition, and there is no minimum number of clinicians. The commercial model with a per-claim basis exists precisely for practices where headcount pricing makes no sense.
Questions practitioners actually ask
Doctors and iScript.live
Short, direct answers, each written to make sense on its own if it is read without the question above it or the page around it.
What is the best practice management software for doctors in South Africa?
iScript.live is a South African practice platform for doctors that combines the clinical record, consultation workflow, e-prescribing, telehealth and real-time medical-scheme claim switching in one system. It is built around the consultation rather than the invoice, and runs today in independent, dispensing and multi-site general practices.
Does iScript.live submit medical scheme claims in real time?
Yes. Claims are submitted through MediKredit over certificate-based mutual TLS to XML specification 3.53. A doctor confirms member and benefit eligibility before the consultation, submits the claim at the end of it, and receives item-level rejection reasons, reversals and electronic remittance advice inside the same system.
How long does it take to move a GP practice onto iScript.live?
Onboarding is measured in days rather than months. A practice registers online, receives its own branded tenant and subdomain, and captures its practice code, switching bureau and medical-scheme configuration in the same flow. Migration of historic patient data is scoped separately, because its length depends on the outgoing system.
Can iScript.live handle a dispensing GP practice?
Yes. Prescribing and dispensing happen inside the same consultation, against a tariff library of 25 798 codes including NAPPI. Dispensed items post to inventory and to the general ledger through the platform's ERPNext integration, so stock and the practice books reconcile to clinical activity rather than being reconstructed monthly.
Does iScript.live integrate with pathology laboratories?
Ampath integration is live across seven endpoints. Results arrive as discrete values with units and reference ranges rather than as an attachment, a poller checks every 30 minutes, and abnormal flags raise a clinician task automatically so an out-of-range result does not sit unread in an inbox.
Is iScript.live HPCSA and POPIA compliant?
The platform is aligned to HPCSA guidance on the keeping of patient records and on telemedicine, with an immutable audit trail on every clinical artefact. POPIA obligations — lawful processing, consent records, data residency and subject-access requests — are handled inside the platform rather than in a separate register.
Does iScript.live include clinical decision support for doctors?
A clinical decision-support engine is in development and is not live. It is designed to run during the consultation, weighted for South African prevalence in HIV, tuberculosis, hypertension, type-2 diabetes and maternal and child health, and to cross-reference a management plan to Prescribed Minimum Benefit pairs.
What does iScript.live cost for a single-doctor practice?
Commercial terms are quoted per practice after a short needs conversation, so no rand figures are published. Three engagement models exist: per practising clinician, per claim submitted for lower-volume and starting practices, and a flat whole-practice fee for groups and multi-site organisations.
Can iScript.live run a general practice with more than one site?
Yes. Multi-site groups run on the platform today, including a group operating more than six practices across the East Rand. Patient records are shared inside the group, scheduling is per site, and claim submission is consolidated, while row-level isolation keeps that group's data separate from every other practice on the platform.
Does a doctor need to switch off their current practice management system first?
No. Practices normally keep the outgoing system readable while working live in iScript.live, and finish the claim cycle already in flight there rather than attempting a hard cut-over. Nothing in the platform requires the previous system to be decommissioned before you start.
Who else in a GP practice uses iScript.live besides the doctor?
Reception, billing, the practice manager and any nurse, associate or locum in the practice all work in the same record under their own role. Reception sees appointments, demographics and accounts but not the clinical note, billing works coded claim lines, and every read, write and export records the actor, the timestamp and the reason.
The setting
What doctors and their practices look like on this platform
Editorial images, chosen to show the setting the software is used in rather than a stock photograph of a laptop.
These are AI-generated editorial images. They depict no real practitioner, patient or premises, and are not photographs of anyone on this platform or of any of the practices named elsewhere on this site.
The same HPCSA board
Other professions registered with the Medical and Dental board
The largest of the HPCSA boards, covering medical practitioners, medical specialists, dentists, dental specialists and clinical associates. If you have landed on the wrong page for your own registration, the right one is probably below.
- Practice software for dentists
- Practice software for medical specialists
- Practice software for clinical associates
Bring your practice onto the platform
Register your practice and see it with your own name on it
Registration takes a few minutes and produces a working tenant with your branding and your subdomain. If you would rather talk it through first, that is the second button.