CRYPTON practical guides
Clinic continuity guide
Ten practical questions about phones, bookings, claiming, clinical systems and patient information.
Use these checks with your current IT provider. This guide is a starting point, not an audit or confirmation that your systems are secure.
Do not enter patient names, Medicare numbers, clinical notes or confidential records.
1. Phones and bookings
phones, internet, bookings and reception tasks are usually the first visible failure patients notice.
Check: Confirm who owns the fallback and when it was last tested with reception.
Ask your IT provider: Ask for the documented fallback for calls, bookings, patient updates, and reception triage during an outage.
2. Medicare claiming and billing
claiming and payment problems can keep the clinic moving on the day but create revenue, reconciliation, and fraud issues later.
Check: Document the manual process and assign who checks unreconciled claims or payments.
Ask your IT provider: Ask for the Medicare claiming, billing, Tyro/EFTPOS fallback and end-of-day reconciliation owner.
3. Clinical software downtime
downtime pressure is when staff are most likely to use screenshots, personal notes, or unsafe workarounds.
Check: Run a short downtime tabletop with reception and one clinician.
Ask your IT provider: Ask for the downtime process for Best Practice, MedicalDirector, Genie, Pracsoft, appointment notes, billing, and follow-up.
4. Shared devices
shared reception and consult-room devices can expose patient information if sessions, roles, and device controls are loose.
Check: Review reception PCs, consult-room workstations, and tablets for shared-login or auto-lock gaps.
Ask your IT provider: Ask for shared-device management, auto-lock, encryption, role access, and remote-wipe coverage.
5. Results, recalls, referrals, printing and scanning
documents and results are critical to daily work even when their failure looks less dramatic than a full outage.
Check: List the tasks that stop patient care or follow-up and assign fallback owners.
Ask your IT provider: Ask for fallback ownership for printers, scanners, secure messaging, pathology/radiology results, recalls, and referrals.
6. Leaver access
disabling a main account does not confirm that remote access, synced files, vendor access or personal devices have been cleaned up.
Check: Add personal-device, remote-access, and clinical-software checks to offboarding.
Ask your IT provider: Ask for a recent leaver record showing account disablement, session revocation, device review, and remote-access removal.
7. Suspicious access
clinic leadership needs to know about risky access before it becomes a privacy incident, patient complaint, or regulator issue.
Check: Confirm the alert list and reporting cadence with the provider.
Ask your IT provider: Ask who receives risky sign-in, mailbox-rule, and repeated-failed-login alerts, and how the clinic is notified.
8. Restore confidence
a backup is only useful if the clinic knows it can restore the right systems quickly enough to keep patient operations moving.
Check: Run a controlled restore test for email, shared files, and one critical clinic dataset.
Ask your IT provider: Ask for the last restore-test date, what was restored, and whether appointment, clinical, billing, email, and shared-file data were covered.
9. Provider and admin access
IT providers, software vendors, and senior users may have broad access that needs clear ownership, logging, and review.
Check: Review provider and admin access with the current IT provider and remove anything no longer needed.
Ask your IT provider: Ask for the named access list for Microsoft 365, clinical software, remote support tools, backups, and administrator accounts.
10. AI use
AI can help with policies, admin templates, summaries, and patient communication, but staff need clear boundaries for patient information.
Check: Define two or three useful AI uses and the patient information that must not be entered.
Ask your IT provider: Ask for approved AI tools, useful use cases, and patient-data rules given to staff.
Talk to CRYPTON
Tell us where IT gets in the way of your work. We can discuss the findings and a sensible next step.