IT support for dental and private clinics
Managed IT for dental surgeries, private GP practices, physiotherapy and aesthetic clinics across London and Essex. Patient records are the most sensitive data a small business can hold, and they are held on equipment that has to work while a patient is in the chair.
What we usually find in a clinic
Clinical IT grows around the clinical work, not the other way round. The result is familiar: a practice management system everyone depends on, an imaging PC nobody dares touch, and a reception computer that has been logged in as the same user since 2019.
- Patient records are special category data. UK data protection law expects encryption, restricted access and a record of who saw what. A breach involving health data has to reach the ICO within 72 hours, and that clock starts whether or not anyone knows what happened yet.
- Imaging and scanner machines age badly. X-ray, OPG and intraoral systems often run software that the manufacturer will not certify on a current version of Windows. That machine cannot simply be left on the same flat network as everything else.
- Ransomware is aimed at practices, not just hospitals. Small clinics are attacked precisely because they hold valuable records and rarely have anyone watching the network.
- Reception is a public place. Screens face the waiting room, staff share one login because it is quicker, and the appointment book stays open all day.
- Compliance paperwork keeps arriving. Practices working with NHS data have the Data Security and Protection Toolkit to submit, and CQC inspections look at how records are governed and secured. Both ask for evidence, not intentions.
- Downtime has a diary attached. An hour of broken IT in an office is annoying. In a clinic it is a room full of people whose appointments have to be moved.
What we look after
Day to day
- The computers, networks and connections your practice management system runs on — Dentally, Software of Excellence, iSmile, SystmOne, EMIS or whatever your clinic uses. We do not support those applications themselves; their vendors do. Everything underneath them is ours
- Surgery and reception workstations, kept quick enough that nobody works around them
- Imaging and scanner PCs handled carefully, in agreement with the equipment supplier
- Microsoft 365 email, files and licences, with joiners and leavers done properly
- Business-grade internet with a fallback, and phones that still ring when the line does not
Where the risk sits
- Multi-factor authentication on every account that can reach patient data
- Individual logins for individual people, so the audit trail means something
- Network separation, so an ageing imaging machine cannot become the way in
- Encryption on every device that holds or can reach records, including laptops taken home
- Backups kept apart from the live system, tested by restoring them, and built to survive ransomware rather than be encrypted alongside everything else
- Screen locking, positioning and timeouts at reception — small things that stop a waiting room reading someone else's notes
On DSPT, CQC and the ICO, plainly
We are an IT provider, not a compliance consultancy or a clinical governance adviser. Your registration, your policies and your submissions stay yours, and no IT contract changes that.
What we can do is make the technical half real and evidenced: controls that are switched on for everyone, access that is restricted and logged, backups that have actually been restored, encryption you can point to, and a written incident response process for the day something happens. When you complete a Data Security and Protection Toolkit submission or a CQC inspector asks how records are protected, the answers should already exist rather than be assembled the night before.
Start with an honest look at your setup
Our free IT health check reviews what you have and returns a written summary — what is solid, what is exposed, and what would hurt most on a busy clinic day. No obligation afterwards.
Managed support starts at £50 per user per month where everything is in the cloud, or £75 per user where you run your own server, with a minimum of £300 per month. Our prices are published, so you can compare us before you speak to us.