What gets in the way
- Small faults stop the counter. When the label printer or a consult room PC stops, medication labels and invoices stop with it, and clients wait at the counter.
- Saturdays and after hours. Many clinics open on weekends, and an internet outage on a Saturday can sit until Monday if the weekend team doesn’t know who to ring.
- Records you have to keep. Queensland vets must keep treatment records for three years, and those records live in the practice software and the backups behind it.
- Emails that ask for money. Radiology reports, referral histories and supplier invoices arrive by email every day, which makes a fake request to change payment details easy to miss.
How we help
- Bastion Managed Services: One owner per ticket and a named technical lead who knows your consult rooms, so a printer or PC fault gets picked up quickly and owned until it’s fixed.
- Backup & Recovery: Server and Microsoft 365 backups with failures raised the day they happen and restores tested on a schedule, so clinical records can actually come back.
- Network & Connectivity: Guest wi-fi kept apart from the computers that run the practice, on a monitored network with the option of a second internet path.
- Business Telephony: A hosted phone system with call flows and after-hours handling matched to your opening hours, run on the network we manage.
- Security Awareness: Short sessions so front desk and nursing staff know which held emails are routine and which need a phone call first.
- Microsoft 365 & Identity: Multi-factor on every account and shared mailboxes set up properly, so reception email doesn’t rely on one shared password.
Obligations worth knowing
- Under Queensland’s Veterinary Surgeons Regulation 2016, a vet must keep a treatment record for each animal for 3 years from the day the last information is added. Source
- Most small businesses with an annual turnover of $3 million or less aren’t covered by the Privacy Act, but some are, and the OAIC has a checklist to work out where your practice sits. Source
The small jobs are the job
A year of IT at two veterinary hospitals we look after had no big projects. It was a steady run of small jobs, each landing on someone trying to see a patient: an internet outage, a label printer, merged email accounts, calls dropping out, backup failures. Most took under half an hour of logged work. What mattered was how quickly someone picked them up.
That’s what managed services is built around. One person owns each ticket until it closes, and the service desk runs 8am to 6pm on weekdays with after-hours phone support at the after-hours rate. For the weekend, a ten-minute Friday afternoon check gets the Saturday team ready before anything breaks.
Records, backups and the server in the back room
Queensland’s Veterinary Surgeons Regulation 2016 requires a treatment record for each animal, kept for three years from the last entry. That makes the practice software and its backups part of your obligations, not just your convenience. Our backup and recovery service raises a failed backup the day it happens and tests restores on a schedule, so you know the records can come back rather than assuming it.
Held emails and guest wi-fi
Clinics run on email: radiology reports, referral histories, supplier invoices. One of those hospitals asked us to release four held emails in a year, and one of them asked the practice to update payment details. That one needs a phone call before anyone acts on it, and security awareness training makes that a habit at the front desk.
Clients waiting with their animals will ask for the wi-fi. Network management keeps the guest network apart from the consult room PCs, the practice software and the card terminals, so a guest’s phone has no path to anything but the internet.