The server goes down at 8:15 on a Monday with a full schedule. What happens?

A practice that cannot open charts is not practicing, so this sits at the top of our severity list. You call, or more often our monitoring alerts us first, and a technician is engaged within the hour. For a hardware failure we are onsite. For most software and service failures we are working on it remotely within minutes.

The more useful answer is what happens before that morning. Server health monitoring means a failing drive, a service that keeps restarting, or a database growing toward a limit gets caught while it is an inconvenience rather than an outage. Most of the Monday mornings we prevent, you never hear about.

We also build the downtime procedure with you, because at some point something will be down regardless of how well it is run. Printed schedules for the day available offline, a paper process for the front desk, and clarity on what can and cannot continue. Practices that have that keep seeing patients. Practices that do not send people home.

On what an hour costs you, we do not guess. Take your production per chair per hour, multiply by the chairs affected, and that is the number the entire conversation about IT spending should be measured against. Most owners have never done that arithmetic and are startled by it.