What actually goes wrong with IT in a vet clinic: a year of tickets from two practices

If you manage a vet practice, IT problems don’t arrive labelled as IT problems. They show up as a consult room that can’t open a patient record, a referral report that never arrived, or a phone that cuts out mid-call with an anxious owner on the other end.

We went back through a full year of support tickets, 19 August 2025 to 18 August 2026, from two South East Queensland veterinary hospitals we look after. Here’s what actually went wrong, and a short check you can run against your own practice.

The big number that isn’t a problem

The two hospitals logged 216 tickets with us in that year. That sounds like a lot.

189 of them were automatic notifications from the hosted phone system: messages that a phone line’s settings had changed, that an update had installed or was ready, or that a security certificate had renewed. They come to our service desk, not the practice, and none of them needed any work logged.

That leaves 27 tickets raised by people, two of which were follow-up replies, and just under 10 hours of logged work across the whole year. For two busy hospitals, that’s a setup that mostly works. Which makes the problems that did turn up worth a closer look.

Internet outages cost the most

The biggest single ticket of the year was an internet outage at one of the practices in January, with 4 hours of work logged against it.

Another outage hit on a Saturday in late June. The ticket for it came in the following Monday.

Plenty of vet practices trade on Saturdays, and a lot of what a consult room needs now runs over the internet. Our service desk is open 8am to 6pm on weekdays, with after-hours support by phone. The question for any practice is simpler than who your provider is: when the connection drops on a Saturday morning, does the person on the front desk know who to ring, and what still works while they wait?

Phones that drop out

Two tickets were about calls dropping, one in December and one in May. The May one also covered setting up guest Wi-Fi, and took an hour.

Dropped calls are frustrating to chase because they’re rarely happening when the technician looks. If your phones cut out, jot down the time, which handset and roughly how many people were on calls. That turns a vague complaint into something we can match against the connection and the phone system.

There was also one request for a call recording, which is a good reminder to know whether your calls are recorded and who can get at them.

Consult rooms, printers and logins

This is the everyday layer, and it’s where most of the human tickets sat:

• Consult room computers that wouldn’t connect, on a Saturday morning in September.
• The label printer, which took an hour and a half to sort in October.
• Another printer that stopped working in April.
• A computer that froze on restart.
• A problem logging in to the remote desktop server.
• A password request, and a fix for file previews that were being blocked.

None of these are dramatic. Each one stops someone doing their job for a while, and in a practice that usually means a client waiting at the counter.

Backups that failed

In May, two tickets a week apart were about backups failing, one of them on the server.

A failed backup is the quietest problem a practice can have. Nothing looks wrong until the day you need a file back. The only real proof a backup works is a test restore, and a green tick in a report isn’t that.

Clinical email held by the filter

Four times in the year, staff asked us to release an email that the email filter had held. Three look like everyday practice mail: a radiographic report, a patient history sent across from another practice, and a supplier invoice.

The fourth asked the practice to update its payment details. That’s exactly the kind of email that should stay held until someone has checked it with the sender by phone, on a number they already had.

A filter that holds a radiograph report is annoying. A filter that lets through a fake request to change bank details is expensive. Getting the balance right means someone checks held items regularly and staff know which ones never to release on their own.

The rest of the email tickets were housekeeping: merging accounts, adding a new mailbox, changing a display name, and updating the records that let a third-party service send email on the practice’s behalf.

A self-check for practice managers

Run these against your own practice. Each one comes straight from a real ticket above.

1. If the internet drops at 8am on a Saturday, who does the front desk ring, and what can you still do while you wait?
2. When your phones cut out, does anyone write down when it happened and on which handset?
3. When did someone last restore a file from backup, as a test rather than a real emergency?
4. Who checks the held emails in your filter, and do staff know never to release anything about payment details without a phone check?
5. If the label printer or a consult room computer stops, is there a spare, and does anyone on site know how to swap it in?

If you can answer all five without hesitating, your practice is in better shape than most. If two or three made you pause, pick one and sort it this month.

If you’d like to go through the list together for your practice, get in touch.