IT support for healthcare & clinics
IT support for healthcare practices and clinics
Protect patient records, keep clinical and booking systems available through every clinic day, and show CQC and the ICO exactly how you do it.
- Sector
- Healthcare
- Typical size
- up to 250 staff
- Coverage
- Herts, Essex, London
- Proof
- Client reviews
In short
Dig IT Solutions provides managed IT support for private healthcare providers across Hertfordshire, west Essex and London: dental practices, private clinics, physiotherapy and osteopathy practices, aesthetic clinics, care homes and home-care agencies. We secure patient records, support clinical and practice-management systems, manage shared treatment-room devices and back everything up. It suits providers with 5 to 100 staff and no IT team of their own.
Who this is for: Independent and group-owned providers of 5 to 100 staff: dental practices with one to five surgeries, private GP and specialist clinics, physio, osteopathy and chiropractic practices, aesthetic clinics, opticians, care homes and domiciliary care agencies. Our contact is usually the practice manager, registered manager or owner-clinician. We do not position ourselves as an NHS GP practice IT provider, since that support is commissioned centrally through integrated care boards.
Sector pressures
What keeps healthcare & clinics up at night
Patient records are special category data
Health information sits in the highest-risk tier under UK GDPR, and a breach harms patients as well as the business. Records on an unencrypted laptop, a shared login in reception, or clinical notes sent to a personal phone are all reportable incidents waiting to happen. Encryption, named access and audit logs are the baseline.
CQC wants evidence, not assurances
Under the Well-led key question, inspectors ask how records are kept secure, who has access and how care would continue if systems failed. Providers that answer with a printed backup report, a device list and a continuity plan have a very different inspection from those who say it is all handled by the IT person.
Clinical systems and shared devices in treatment rooms
Dentally, Exact, Cliniko, Semble and care-planning platforms run alongside imaging sensors, intra-oral cameras and card terminals, on PCs used by several clinicians a day. Auto-locking that is fast enough to protect records but slow enough not to interrupt a consultation, driver updates that do not break the X-ray, and USB control all need managing.
DSP Toolkit submissions and NHS contracts
Any provider with access to NHS patient data, including NHS dental contracts, completes the Data Security and Protection Toolkit each year, and it asks concrete questions about patching, MFA, backups and staff training. Wholly private providers get similar questionnaires from insurers and referral partners, so the same evidence pays twice.
Reception has to keep working
Bookings, reminders, referrals, card payments and phones all run through the front desk. When the internet or phone line drops, appointments are missed and patients go elsewhere. With Ofcom's PSTN switch-off due in January 2027, many clinics also need to move their lines and alarm dialers before the copper service is withdrawn.
What we do
How we support you
Support that fits around clinic lists
Remote support via Splashtop so reception is not left waiting with a patient at the desk, and on-site engineers from Hoddesdon for surgery PCs, imaging workstations and network faults, scheduled outside clinic hours wherever we can.
Microsoft 365 configured for clinical confidentiality
MFA and conditional access on every account, shared mailboxes for referrals and results so nothing sits in a personal inbox, and SharePoint permissions that keep HR, finance and clinical documents apart. Leaver access is removed the day a locum finishes.
EDR and patching on every device, including the surgery
Endpoint Detection and Response on reception and treatment-room PCs, with Windows updates managed through our remote monitoring and management platform. Imaging drivers are tested on one machine before updates are released to the rest, so a Tuesday update does not take the X-ray offline.
Backups that satisfy the DSP Toolkit and CQC
Local and cloud backup of on-premises clinical databases and imaging, Microsoft 365 backup for mailboxes and documents, and restore tests with written reports you can attach to a toolkit submission or hand to an inspector.
Networks, Wi-Fi and phones for a clinical site
UniFi or Cisco Meraki networks with separate segments for clinical devices, staff and patient Wi-Fi, structured cabling when a new surgery is fitted out, and 8x8 VoIP with call queues and out-of-hours messaging that is ready for the PSTN switch-off.
CCTV and access control that respects patient privacy
UniFi Protect cameras covering entrances, reception and stock or medicines storage, with retention and viewing rights set in line with ICO guidance so treatment areas are never recorded. Joiner and leaver forms cover door codes and alarm users as well as logins.
Software we work alongside
Systems we see every week
- Dentally
- Software of Excellence (Exact)
- Cliniko
- Semble
- TM3
- Private Practice Software (PPS)
- Nourish and Person Centred Software for care planning
- Microsoft 365 with Teams for multidisciplinary calls
Listed to show familiarity, not as vendor partnerships. We support the platform your software runs on and work with each vendor’s support team on your behalf.
Compliance and expectations
Care Quality Commission
CQC's framework asks providers to keep accurate, secure records and to be well-led, which in practice means being able to show how access is controlled, how systems are protected and how care would continue during an outage. We produce the reports and inventories that make those answers straightforward.
Care Quality CommissionUK GDPR and the ICO
Health data is special category data, and the ICO expects proportionate technical controls: encryption, access on a need-to-know basis, secure disposal of old devices and a route for reporting breaches within 72 hours. ICO guidance on CCTV also governs how cameras are used on a clinical site.
Information Commissioner's OfficeData Security and Protection Toolkit
Providers handling NHS patient data submit the toolkit annually, answering questions about MFA, patching, backups, unsupported systems and staff training. We supply the technical evidence for each assertion and flag anything that would fail before you submit.
NHS Data Security and Protection ToolkitCyber Essentials
Increasingly requested by insurers, referral partners and NHS contract holders. The five controls map closely to the DSP Toolkit's technical assertions, so a clinic that prepares for one has largely prepared for the other.
NCSC Cyber Essentials
Switching to us
How the handover works
Taking over a clinic's IT begins with a discovery visit at a quiet time to record every clinical application, imaging device, card terminal, phone line and login, and to find out which of them the previous provider never documented. We run in parallel during handover, move systems on a closed day or after the last patient, and brief clinicians and reception separately, because they use the systems differently. What to expect, and what we need from your outgoing provider, is set out at our switching IT provider guide.
FAQ
Healthcare & Clinics: questions we are asked
Do private clinics and dental practices need to complete the DSP Toolkit?
What does CQC expect from our IT?
Can you support Dentally, Exact, Cliniko or our care-planning system?
Can patient data be stored in Microsoft 365?
How much does IT support cost for a clinic or dental practice?
How do we keep shared surgery computers secure?
Insights
Guides for healthcare & clinics
Industry Guides
IT support for healthcare practices: clinics, dental and physio
What UK private clinics, dental and physio practices need from IT support: CQC expectations, NHS DSPT, clinical systems, patient records and backup.
Cyber Security
BYOD security risks: how to let staff use personal devices for work safely
The real risks of staff using personal phones and laptops for work, and how UK small businesses control them with Intune, app protection and a BYOD policy.
Cyber Security
Ransomware: how it gets in and how a small business stops it
How ransomware enters a UK small business (phishing, exposed remote access, stolen logins), the layered defences that stop it and how to recover without paying.
Next step
Talk to an engineer, not a sales script
Tell us what is not working, or what you are planning, and we will give you a straight view on what it would take to fix.