Two South East Queensland veterinary hospitals we look after gave us a clear picture this year of what IT in a vet practice really involves. Not big projects. A steady run of small jobs, each of which landed on someone trying to see a patient or answer a worried owner.
From 19 August 2025 to 18 August 2026, the two hospitals’ requests added up to just under 10 hours of logged work. Here’s where it went, and what we’d suggest any practice ask its IT provider.
The outage that took the most time
The biggest single job of the year was an internet outage at one hospital in January 2026, with four hours of work logged. In late June, the other hospital lost its internet on a Saturday, and the ticket came in the following Monday.
For a vet practice, the internet isn’t just email. Practice software, card payments, referrals and often the phones depend on it.
Email that needed tidying
In September 2025, we merged email accounts at one hospital, a 45-minute job. Through the year there were smaller changes too: a new email account, a display name change, updates to the records that let other services send email on the practice’s behalf, and linking the practice’s domain name to a veterinary platform.
Four times, staff asked for an email held by the filter to be released: a radiographic report, a patient history from another practice, a supplier invoice, and one asking the practice to update its payment details. That last one is exactly the kind of message that should be checked by phone before anyone acts on it.
Label printers and practice software
The label printer took an hour and a half to sort in October 2025. In a vet practice, medication labels come off that printer at the counter, so when it stops, clients wait.
Another printer stopped in April 2026. In July, a ticket covered polling in the practice management software, a quick fix.
Phones and guest wi-fi
In May 2026, calls were dropping out at one hospital. We logged an hour on that ticket, which also covered setting up guest wi-fi. Earlier in the year there was a request for a call recording.
Backups and the server
Two tickets in May 2026, a week apart, were backup failures, one of them for the server. There was also a problem signing in to the remote desktop server in April, a computer that froze on restart, and consult room computers that wouldn’t connect on a Saturday in September 2025.
What any vet practice should ask its IT provider
Most of those jobs took under half an hour of logged work. What matters is how quickly someone picks them up, and whether the bigger risks are covered before they bite. These are the questions we’d ask.
- When the internet drops on a Saturday, who do we ring, and what still works while we wait?
- When a backup fails, who sees it, and how do we know the next one worked?
- If the label printer or a consult room PC stops, is there a spare, and can someone on site swap it in?
- Who checks held emails, and do staff know never to act on a payment details change without a phone call?
- Is guest wi-fi kept apart from the computers that run the practice?
If you’d like to go through those five questions for your practice, get in touch.