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Practice — diagnostic

The Practice Uptime Scan.

Twelve statements. Four elements. About four minutes. It is a self-assessment, not a network scan: it records what you can answer about your practice today, and what you cannot answer is part of the result.

Begin the Scan How the result is set

What it measures

It asks twelve statements, three for each element. Answer from what you know today. Where you are unsure, choose Not sure. An unsure answer is information, not a failure.

  • Earth: workstations, servers, network, and imaging hardware. Whether the practice knows what it owns and can survive losing one machine.
  • Water: backup, restore, and data continuity. Whether the copy exists, and whether anyone has opened it.
  • Air: connectivity, Wi-Fi, phones, cloud, and remote support. Whether the front desk and the operatories can reach what they need when a link fails.
  • Fire: security, ransomware, and HIPAA safeguards. Who has access, how identity is proven, and what the first hour of an incident looks like.

What it does not do

It is not a penetration test, a security audit, or a HIPAA risk analysis. It does not read your network, price a fix, or compare you to other practices. There are no benchmarks here, because we do not keep a dataset of practices to compare you against, and inventing one would make the result less useful.

There is no field for patient information. Do not enter any.

How the result is set

Each element has three statements, answered yes, not sure, or no. Every statement counts the same.

  • Stable: all three answers are yes, or two are yes and one is not sure.
  • Watch: one statement is no, or two or more are not sure.
  • Critical: two or more are no.

The readout counts the statements in place for each element, then sets the band. There is no percentage and no weighting, because a percentage would suggest a precision the answers do not have. The overall readout is the band of the weakest element. We do not average the four, because an average hides the one element that will cost the practice a day.

How to read it

Stable means the practice has it and can show it. Watch means one gap, or one thing nobody could confirm. Critical means more than one gap and no written fallback. The full copy for each band, and what to do next, appears with your result.

What happens next

You may not need us. If all four elements come back stable, the honest recommendation is to keep your records current and run the Scan again when something changes. If an element comes back watch or critical, the next step is an assessment, starting with that element.

Scan

Twelve statements about your practice.

Answer from what you know today. Where you are unsure, choose Not sure.

Element 1 of 4 · 0 of 12 answered
Earth — workstations, servers, network, imaging hardware

These questions are about the machines in the operatories and the room that runs them.

We have a current list of every workstation, server, and imaging device, with its age and where it is.

Free disk space and drive health on the practice-management server and the imaging machine are checked before they cause a problem.

If a workstation failed on a full day, we could move that operatory to another machine without cancelling patients.

Water — backup, restore, data continuity

These questions are about what happens after data is lost, not whether the backup job looks green.

Someone at the practice can say when a backup was last restored and opened in the practice-management software, not only that the job completed.

At least one copy of practice data is held somewhere ransomware on the practice network cannot reach.

If the server were unavailable tomorrow morning, we know which paper forms we would use, which spare machine, and who would run the day.

Air — connectivity, Wi-Fi, phones, cloud, remote support

These questions are about whether the front desk and the operatories can reach the systems they need.

Guest Wi-Fi is separate from the network the practice-management and imaging systems use.

When the internet drops, we know who to call and what the fallback is for phones and the front desk.

The cloud services the practice relies on, such as email, patient reminders, and the imaging archive, are documented with who owns each account.

Fire — security, ransomware, HIPAA safeguards

This is the group practices answer from memory. Answer from what is written down and current.

Every person who can see patient data has their own login, and access is removed on their last day.

Email, remote access, and cloud accounts require a second factor beyond a password.

We know the first hour of a ransomware incident: who we call, what we disconnect, and where the clean copy of our data is.

Press 1 for Yes, 2 for Not sure, 3 for No. Enter continues.