What Should a Dental Practice Ask an IT Provider?
Dental practices tend to hire IT the same way they buy a compressor: on a recommendation, once, and then never think about it again until the day it stops. The difference is that when IT stops, the schedule stops with it, and a full day of operatories sitting idle is expensive in a way a compressor never is.
What should a dental practice ask an IT provider before hiring them?
Ask about imaging before anything else: whether they have worked with your sensors and pan unit, how they handle the bridge between the practice management system and the imaging software, and where those image files actually live. Then ask about update timing, backups that are tested, and whether they will sign a Business Associate Agreement.
Why imaging is the question that matters most
Most IT companies will tell you they support dental practices. Fewer have spent an afternoon working out why a sensor works in operatory two and not operatory four, or why the bridge from Dentrix to the imaging software stopped launching after an update.
Imaging is the real IT load in dentistry. Sensors and pan units generate large files all day, every day. The storage only ever grows. And the fragile part is almost never the practice management system itself — it is the bridge between the PMS and the imaging software, which is usually a small piece of vendor middleware that nobody owns and everybody blames.
So ask directly: have you supported this exact combination before, and who do you call when the bridge breaks? A provider who answers with a specific story is worth more than one who answers with a certification.
The rest of the questions
When do you install updates?
Practice management systems need careful update timing. A patch pushed at 10am on a Tuesday is not a maintenance window, it is an incident. Ask when they do disruptive work, whether they check with you first, and what their rule is for clinical software versus everything else.
How do you prioritise a clinical outage against a routine ticket?
These are not the same emergency, and a provider who treats them the same has not thought about your business. An outage affecting the schedule, imaging, or every operatory should get a different response than a printer question. Ask how that distinction works in practice, and ask for their real measured response time rather than the number in the brochure.
Will you sign a Business Associate Agreement?
Yes is the only acceptable answer. Any provider touching systems that hold patient information is a business associate under HIPAA, and the agreement should be signed before they touch the network, not after. If there is hesitation here, stop.
How do you test backups?
Not run — test. A backup that has never been restored is a hypothesis. Ask how often a test restore is performed, whether you are told the result, and roughly how long it would take to get the practice running again. Include the imaging archive in that question specifically, because it is the largest and the most often left out.
What is not included in the monthly fee?
Every agreement has a line where the flat fee stops and hourly billing starts. Ask for it as a list: projects, after-hours work, new employee setup, operatory moves, vendor coordination, work on software they do not officially support.
What happens when a hygienist or front desk person leaves?
Disabling the PMS login is the easy part. The shared front-desk account, the imaging workstation everyone signs into the same way, the scanner with a saved password, and the phone that still has practice email on it are the parts that get missed. The same checklist we wrote for medical practices applies almost line for line.
The two answers that should worry you
“We handle everything.” Nobody handles everything at a flat rate. A provider who says this has either not read their own agreement or intends to reinterpret it later.
A response-time guarantee with no measurement behind it. Fifteen minutes sounds excellent. Ask what percentage of tickets actually met it last quarter, and watch what happens. A provider who can produce the number is more credible than one who can only produce the promise.
What we would say about ourselves
We are a small IT company in Haines City covering Polk and Osceola. Most of what we do is planned and remote; when hands are needed in the operatory, we schedule it. If you need someone in the building inside an hour, we are not the right fit and we will say so on the first call.
Managed support runs $125 to $299 per user per month depending on how much security and compliance work sits on top, and there is a 90-day money-back guarantee. If you would rather just have someone look at an agreement another provider has put in front of you, we are glad to do that.
Related reading: Dentrix vs Eaglesoft vs Open Dental and how we support dental practices.
General information, not legal advice.
The same question, other industries
Each of these covers the questions that matter in that specific business, rather than the generic list.
