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Whether you’re a one-person operation or a growing business with a full team, we’re here to help. Get in touch and let’s talk about what we can do for you.
Whether you’re a one-person operation or a growing business with a full team, we’re here to help. Get in touch and let’s talk about what we can do for you.
A full book, systems that don’t interrupt it, and the compliance paperwork handled.
You can put a number on an hour of surgery time, which makes dental one of the few sectors where the cost of IT downtime is exactly calculable. You also carry an unusual compliance load for a business of your size: CQC registration, information governance, and for NHS practices the Data Security and Protection Toolkit every year. This page is about both, because in practice they’re the two things that actually take up a dental practice manager’s time.
Dental practices sit in an awkward spot. Clinically and commercially you operate like a serious healthcare business. Administratively you’re often a handful of people, one of whom is a practice manager already doing three jobs.
The IT problems follow from that.
The diary is unforgiving. A surgery that can’t pull up records or images at nine in the morning doesn’t run late, it loses the appointment. Multiply by the number of chairs and you have a number your accountant would recognise.
The kit outruns the infrastructure. Intraoral scanners, CBCT and CAD/CAM produce far more data than a practice generated ten years ago, and they were bought one at a time as clinical decisions rather than IT ones. Often the server, the network or the backup was never revisited to match.
Nobody has time for the paperwork. CQC wants evidence of how patient information is protected. NHS practices have to complete the Data Security and Protection Toolkit annually. Both are answerable, but somebody has to gather the evidence, and that somebody is usually your practice manager at eleven at night.
Downtime has a price per chair per hour. Compliance has a deadline. Neither should depend on your practice manager remembering.
Dental records are special category health data. A breach is reportable, it’s a CQC matter, and it’s the kind of thing patients hear about. The routes in are unremarkable: a mailbox without multi-factor authentication, a shared reception login, an imaging workstation running an operating system the vendor certified years ago and won’t allow you to update.
Meanwhile the compliance requirements don’t wait. A DSPT submission missed or completed inaccurately is an NHS contract issue, and CQC will ask how you protect patient information at inspection whether or not the timing suits you.
The good news is that the technical work behind both problems is the same work. Protect the accounts, isolate the equipment that can’t be patched, make the backup real and tested, control who can see what, and document it as you go. Do that and the surgeries stay running, and the evidence for CQC or the toolkit already exists rather than being assembled in a panic.
Servers, networks and workstations monitored and maintained, with the connections between your practice management software, imaging and scanners kept in working order. Problems found before the first patient rather than during them.
Enforced multi-factor authentication, individual logins, access controls that match your team structure, encryption, and tested backup covering both your practice management database and your imaging.
We document the technical controls as we implement them, so when inspection or the annual toolkit submission comes round, the evidence about your systems already exists in a form you can use.
Two minutes, a handful of questions, and a straight answer on where the gaps are. Useful ahead of an inspection or a toolkit submission.
We recommend Professional for dentistry because of what you hold and what you’re asked to prove. Patient records are special category health data, you’re inspected, and NHS practices have an annual security submission to make. Professional gives you the strongest security stack we offer plus Cyber Essentials tools and certification support, and Cyber Essentials sits neatly alongside the questions CQC and the toolkit ask, so the same work serves both.
For a small private practice with simple systems, Essential covers complete cloud and email security, real Microsoft 365 backup, device security and your Microsoft 365 Business Premium licence. It’s a solid position, and stepping up is straightforward when you need to.
Either way, the first job is the same: a look at your server, your imaging workstations, your backups and who can currently see what. That’s where both the downtime risk and the compliance risk live.
The Professional IT Support Service is for businesses that want the best — complete IT support, the strongest security we offer, and Cyber Essentials tools and certification support all in one package. If you need to protect your reputation, meet compliance requirements, and have confidence your IT is in safe hands, this is it.
Key Features
Every package is unlimited support with no ticket caps and no per-incident charges. Rolling monthly terms are available, longer terms carry a discount, and not-for-profit pricing applies across the range.
A shared reception account breaks your audit trail, which matters more in a regulated practice than in an ordinary office. If you need to show who accessed a record, you can’t.
The most targeted accounts belong to the people most likely to ask for an exemption.
If a vendor won’t let you patch the PC attached to your CBCT or scanner, that machine should not be able to reach the rest of your network. You keep the equipment, you lose the risk.
Covering your practice management database and your images. Imaging volumes have grown enormously and plenty of practices are backing up less than they think.
Not everyone needs everything. Straightforward to set up, awkward to explain at inspection if it’s missing.
What’s protected, how, and who checks it. Gathering this once a year from memory is the hard way to do it.
This is the part that stops most people, and it’s usually smaller than imagined.
Server, network, imaging and scanner workstations, devices, backups, and who has access to what. About an hour, no obligation, and you keep the findings.
Usually multi-factor authentication, individual logins, isolating unpatchable clinical workstations, and making the backup real.
Nothing significant changes during surgery hours. Migration and upgrade work happens on your quietest days or outside clinic time, agreed with your practice manager in advance.
Unlimited support, monitoring and patching, with the technical evidence for CQC and the toolkit maintained as we go rather than reconstructed each year.
Questions dental practices ask us
We support everything it runs on: the server, the database, the network, the workstations, the backups and the links to your imaging and scanners. We work alongside your software vendor’s own support rather than replacing it, so you aren’t the one refereeing between two suppliers when something breaks.
Keep it. We isolate that workstation on the network so it can reach what it needs and nothing else, and so nothing from outside can reach it. It doesn’t affect the equipment, it takes very little time, and it removes most of the risk that machine currently carries.
We can help with the technical side, which is most of what it asks about: how systems are protected, how access is controlled, what’s backed up, how devices are managed and patched. We document those as we go so the evidence exists when you need it. The clinical and organisational sections stay with you, and we won’t pretend otherwise.
Similar answer. The information governance questions that touch on systems, access, backup and security are ones we can evidence directly. Practices that have this documented in advance find that part of an inspection considerably less stressful.
Mainly in the compliance obligations rather than the technical work. NHSmail, toolkit submissions and NHS system access all need handling properly, and we’d factor those into how things are set up.
More than most practices expect, and it’s usually growing faster than whatever backup was specified when the equipment arrived. It’s one of the first things we check, because a backup that silently stopped covering your imaging is a common and unpleasant discovery.
We don’t work to fixed SLA response times, and that’s deliberate. A service level agreement treats every ticket as a clock: a surgery that can’t open a patient record and a slow printer both get whatever response somebody wrote into a contract. We work on priority instead, so a chair that can’t run is dealt with straight away.
Yes. Bringing a practice onto consistent systems, or preparing one for due diligence, is common work and it goes far better planned than discovered. Worth talking to us before completion rather than after.
No. You can take any package on a rolling monthly term. Longer terms carry a discount, 5% at 12 months, 10% at 24 and 20% at 36 on IT support, but that’s your choice, not a condition.
We look after dental practices and other regulated, appointment driven businesses across Bristol, Bath, Cheltenham, Gloucester, Somerset and Swindon, with remote support anywhere in the UK. We’re an NCSC Assured Service Provider, Cyber Essentials Plus certified, and ISO 9001 and ISO 27001 accredited, so the evidence standards we hold you to are ones we meet ourselves.
Start with an hour looking at your systems, your imaging and your backups. No obligation, and you’ll come away knowing both what a bad day would cost and what an inspector would find.
There is nothing more annoying than an IT glitch that stops you working efficiently. However, knowing you have access to immediate attention to the glitch and a solution to it, is very reassuring and that is provided by We Do Your IT. We have so appreciated the availability and response given by the team at We Do Your IT, enabling us to remain a productive firm.
Richard Sharp – Sharp Family Law