As the owner of a dental practice, you might wonder whether to outsource IT to a national, specialized IT service rather than a local generalist, perhaps a one-person office. Why do it? What are the challenges and the advantages? Let’s take a look.
01Reasons for outsourcing
Dental offices often outsource IT to a small, local generalist, and staff tend to think the IT person is mainly there to keep things running, jump in when something breaks, and answer questions. In reality, there’s a lot more to the job, and focused dental managed IT services cover it.
02HIPAA requirements
Since the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) was enacted in 1996, all health practitioners, including dental practices, have been responsible for protecting patient information from fraud, theft, and improper access. Staying compliant takes both a full understanding of the requirements and a deep understanding of the hardware and software that bring compliance about. Specialization is key.
Protection from ransomware and viruses
A big part of HIPAA compliance is protection against malicious software, since a breach can mean patient privacy violations. A local IT person will often install anti-virus software and a firewall, but that’s far from a complete solution. Dental managed IT services add managed anti-virus, managed anti-ransomware, and a managed HIPAA-secure firewall, plus real-time monitoring of servers and computers so threats are caught well before they become an issue.
03Backups
Typical local IT
- Backs up once a day
- When systems go down, someone has to find the IT person
- Restores can cost a good part of a day
Dental managed IT
- Incremental backups throughout the day, plus a full nightly backup
- The practice can run from the backup during a restore
- Minimal downtime and data-loss risk
If a threat succeeds in crashing your system, the only solution is recovering from a backup, and every moment of downtime is lost income. A managed backup and recovery system minimizes that downtime and makes the threat of data loss very small.
04Up-to-date software and hardware
Keeping hardware and software current is time-consuming, so it’s often neglected in favor of putting out fires. In a dental practice, being lax here is unacceptable: an out-of-date, unsupported operating system is a prime target for hackers. Upgrading means inventorying hardware to make sure it can run current operating systems, and making sure practice management, imaging, and other dental software is current and compatible. Dental managed IT services handle complete update management and make sure patches are applied.
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