IndustriesHealthcare & dental
The schedule cannot go down during clinic hours, and the records cannot go anywhere.
Dental, medical, physiotherapy, chiropractic and specialist clinics run on a practice management system that has to be up every minute a patient is in the chair, and on records that carry privacy obligations under PIPA and PIPEDA, and under Alberta's Health Information Act where you are a custodian.
What breaks
What breaks in a clinic.
The schedule is the business
When the practice management system is down, the front desk cannot see who is due, the operatories cannot see the chart, and the waiting room fills. Every minute is a patient standing at the counter.
Privacy fails at the front desk, not in the server room
A shared login everyone uses, a screen visible from the waiting area, a hygienist who left in the spring and still has a password. The obligations are the same whether the breach is dramatic or mundane.
Imaging is tied to particular machines
The sensor software, the panoramic unit and the intraoral camera are licensed to specific workstations, sometimes on an operating system the vendor stopped supporting. They cannot simply be replaced, and they cannot be left unpatched either.
The backup has never been restored
The practice database is backed up to something, by someone, at some point. Nobody has tried to bring it back. Ransomware finds clinics for exactly this reason.
Every vendor blames the other one
The practice software vendor says it is the network. The network person says it is the software. The imaging vendor says it is Windows. The clinic is in the middle, with patients waiting.
The software you run
We look after what it runs on.
Practice management, imaging and the provincial systems, on workstations that have to be right for each vendor. We keep them patched on a schedule that respects clinic hours, and we get on the phone with the vendor.
The vendor supports the application. We manage the machines, accounts, network and backups it depends on, and we make the call to the vendor so you do not have to.
- Dental practice management
- Dentrix, Open Dental, Tracker, ABELDent and Curve, with their databases backed up and restore-tested
- Medical and allied health
- Accuro, Med Access and TELUS Wolf EMRs; Jane App and Cliniko for physiotherapy, chiropractic and massage
- Provincial systems
- Alberta Netcare and the provider portals, reached from managed workstations with the right access
- Imaging
- Dexis, Carestream and Sirona sensors, panoramic and cone-beam units, on isolated, documented workstations
- Front desk and comms
- Microsoft 365, the phone system, online booking and reminder tools, and the payment terminal's network
- The building
- Segmented Wi-Fi for staff, patients and imaging equipment, so a guest phone can never see a sensor
Software commonly used in Healthcare & dental.
A scenario, not a case study
A two-location dental clinic on a Tuesday morning.
Suppose a Calgary dental practice with two locations, three dentists, four hygienists and four front-desk staff, running Dentrix on a server at the main clinic.
This is an illustration of how the service works in a business like yours. It does not describe a client.
- Tuesday 2:05am
Monitoring flags a failing disk in the RAID array on the practice server. A ticket opens. Our engineer confirms the array is degraded but running, and orders the replacement drive for delivery before 7am.
- Tuesday 6:50am
The drive is swapped before the first patient. The array rebuilds in the background. The front desk opens Dentrix at 7:45 as usual and never knows.
- Tuesday 10:20am
Had the server failed outright, the practice database would have been restored from the local backup appliance, with a recovery point of four hours and a critical system back within the stated recovery time. The morning's charts would have come from the 6am copy.
- Wednesday
A hygienist gives notice. The help desk schedules her offboarding for her last shift: Dentrix, email, the Netcare access request, and the door code, all in one ticket with a report for the practice manager.
- Thursday
The imaging workstation in operatory three runs an operating system the sensor vendor no longer supports. It sits on its own network segment, cannot reach the internet, and is documented that way for the privacy impact assessment.
- Month end
The report shows the disk replacement, the offboarding, the restore test date and the patch status of every workstation, by location.
What we would put in place
What we would put in place for a clinic.
Tested backups with a local appliance, a segmented network and access control do most of the work. Patching happens outside clinic hours, always.
Backup & recovery
The practice database backed up continuously, restore-tested monthly, with a local appliance so a critical system is back within the stated recovery time rather than at internet speed.
Read about backup & recoveryNetwork infrastructure
Separate segments for staff, patient Wi-Fi and imaging equipment, and monitoring so an outage is seen before the front desk feels it.
Read about network infrastructureCybersecurity
MFA on every account, email filtering, staff training on the phishing that targets clinics, and the evidence your privacy obligations require.
Read about cybersecurityIT support
Patching scheduled outside clinic hours, same-hour offboarding, and a help desk that knows which vendor to call.
Read about it supportCloud & Microsoft 365
One account per staff member, retention set to your obligations, and no patient information in personal mailboxes.
Read about cloud & microsoft 365Co-managed IT
For clinic groups with an office manager or an in-house person who keeps the vendor relationships and hands us the rest.
Read about co-managed it
The package we usually recommend
Professional
- per user, per month
- from $125–155
Professional adds 24/7 threat hunting, full MFA and network monitoring, which is where clinics carry most of their risk. Multi-location groups and practices that need compliance reporting for a privacy review usually move to Enterprise. Either way, add the local backup appliance.
Final pricing depends on environment complexity, compliance requirements and support scope, and is confirmed after the IT audit.
Fair questions
What healthcare & dental businesses ask us.
- Our practice software vendor manages the server.
- They support their software, usually remotely and usually in office hours. Someone still has to patch the server, back it up, test the restore, watch the disks and keep the imaging workstations safe. That is us, and we handle the vendor call.
- Can patient records go to the cloud?
- Sometimes, depending on the system and the obligations you carry as a custodian. We design for what your privacy requirements allow rather than what is convenient, and we document the decision so it survives a review.
- We cannot have downtime for onboarding.
- You will not. The audit happens during the day, the deployment happens after hours, and nothing changes on a clinic morning. Patching runs outside clinic hours permanently.
- Will you sign what our privacy obligations require?
- Yes. We sign the confidentiality and information-handling agreements your obligations call for, and every engagement carries $5M of professional liability insurance.
Book a free IT audit.
No obligation and no pitch deck. We look at what you have, tell you what is wrong with it, and you decide what to do with that.
- A full inventory of your devices, accounts and licences
- A written list of the security gaps we find
- What your current setup is costing you against a flat per-user rate
Prefer to talk? Get in touch