Common questions.

A free, no-obligation 45-minute session — in person or via video call — where we assess your current IT environment, identify compliance gaps, and provide a written summary of findings and recommendations. No sales pitch. Just a plain-language report you can act on, whether or not you engage us.

Our standard onboarding period is 90 days. In that time we install monitoring agents on all your devices, establish your security baseline, patch outstanding vulnerabilities, document your environment, and set up helpdesk access for your team. Most clinics notice the difference within the first two weeks.

We provide hands-on support for Best Practice, Zedmed, MedicalDirector / Pracsoft, Cliniko, Heidi, HotDoc, AutoMed, Dental4Windows, Exact, and Halaxy. If your software isn't on that list, ask us — we'll tell you honestly whether we can support it and at what level.

During clinic hours (7am–7pm AEST, Monday to Saturday), we guarantee a response to any support request within 15 minutes. That means a real person acknowledging your issue and beginning triage — not an automated ticket confirmation. For Critical issues (full system down, clinic unable to operate), we aim to have an engineer actively working on the issue within 15 minutes.

In most cases, yes. We'll assess your current hardware during the Health Check. If something is end-of-life or poses a security risk, we'll tell you upfront — along with a cost estimate and timeline for replacement. You won't receive a surprise invoice. Hardware refresh is always planned, budgeted, and approved by you before we proceed.

The Essential Eight is the Australian Signals Directorate's (ASD) baseline cybersecurity framework. It covers eight key controls: patching applications and operating systems, multi-factor authentication, restricting admin privileges, application control, disabling macros, user application hardening, daily backups, and restricting Microsoft Office macros. ClinicGuard IT assesses your practice against Essential Eight Maturity Level 1 as standard and provides a roadmap to ML2 for practices with higher compliance requirements such as RACGP accreditation.

No. After your 90-day onboarding period, all ClinicGuard IT plans are month-to-month. We earn your business every month. If you want to leave, give us 30 days' notice. No exit fees, no data hostage, no difficult conversations.

Our AI add-ons deliver workflow automation built specifically for medical practice environments — appointment reminders, after-hours triage routing, My Health Record upload automation, document generation, and billing workflows. These are practical, configured automations that save practice managers 60–90 minutes per day. We build, configure, and maintain them as part of your subscription.

Our primary service area is Metropolitan Melbourne and regional Victoria. We deliver most support remotely, so distance is rarely a barrier for day-to-day helpdesk. For on-site visits outside our primary area, we use a partner network and will quote travel costs transparently in advance — never a surprise.

All clients have 24/7 monitoring — we'll know about a server failure before you do, and our monitoring will alert us immediately. For Core plan clients, we'll be working on it before your clinic opens. Pro and Elite clients have an after-hours emergency line for immediate escalation. We also help you establish proper offsite backups and disaster recovery procedures during onboarding — so a server failure becomes a recoverable event, not a clinic closure.