NHS Dentistry

The client base of Dental IT varies considerably from referral centres to dedicated cosmetic dental practices to local general dental practices.

We are delighted to now be working with Henrik Overgaard-Nielsen and the team at NHS Dentist in Fulham, London. This is a huge 10 surgery practice which has served the community exclusively for a good number of years and are a flagship site for NHS dentistry in the U.K.

Henrik had been with two well-known hardware providers in the dental market. The story was all too familiar. Shoddy equipment, shoddier service and so on. This time the practice was running a bizarre configuration of two servers, clustered together to provide DI (Digital Imaging, in this case Schick) on one and the DPMS (Dental Practice Management System - Software of Excellence EXACT) on the other. Performance was shocking, data integrity was suspect and the only person who knew how the system worked at the current provider had since left. A radical overhaul was called for.

The practice decided on a complete re-work of the CAT 5e infrastructure. This was installed alongside the existing cabling in order to minimise disruption and downtime. All work took place out of hours at the client's convenience to ensure no loss of business. A disgraceful daisy chain of several switches was removed and a single gigabit managed switch introduced.

A new HP Proliant server was installed housing all practice data. This utilised RAID, the standard technology for data protection allowing for up to three disk failures before entering into a disaster recovery scenario. Even then the practice data would be secure on high capacity tapes and a fast recovery backup system. Performance was guaranteed using high speed disks and raid controller. The practice took up the option of an on-site contract with HP for spares and repair, so that in the event of a hardware failure, they could be back up and running within the smallest possible time frame.

We liaised with the telephone company to arrange re-siting of the equipment in order to clear the reception area of un-necessary clutter. We also arranged for the PDQ machines to be upgraded to Ethernet (IP/Internet-based) models. This allows for flexibility in moving around the reception area, plus saves costs on line rental as it makes two of these redundant.

When it came to the software, we acted as middle-man and spoke to the relevant support companies to have the software installed onto the new server to allow the migration to go ahead as quickly as possible.

We look forward to working with Henrik and the team for many years to come

 

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Dental IT Ltd delivers IT services and support to the UK Dental Industry. We work with NHS, private and specialist practices across the country. We aim to be the UK's premier dental IT supplier and our computer systems are designed to make the best use of all dental practice software, including Software of Excellence's EXact and Kodak R4.

We ensure our customers' IT systems never let them down, by designing and supporting high-end servers and networks that are extremely reliable and offer outstanding performance.

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