Phone system and IT support for a dental clinic

Who handles both the phones and the IT for a dental clinic in Dallas?

I do. I am Anthony Omini, the owner of Cross River Tech, a small owner-led managed IT company in Dallas, and I support the whole stack a dental clinic runs on: the workstations in the operatories, the server or cloud practice software, the network, the imaging devices and the phones. For the phone side I work with Cleod 9 Voice, a cloud phone system built for small businesses, and I set it up, program it and support it as part of the same service as the computers.

The reason a dental clinic should want phones and IT from one provider is practical, not marketing. A modern phone system is a piece of software running on your network. When a call drops or a voicemail does not arrive, the cause might be the phone service, the switch in your IT closet, the internet connection or a setting on the phone itself. If two companies own those pieces, each will tell you it is the other one. If one company owns all of them, and you have the owner's number, it just gets fixed.

This article covers what a dental phone system should do, how a cloud system compares with the phone lines you may still have, what the network needs to carry calls well, how I set it up, and what happens on the day the internet goes down. Ongoing support for everything else in the clinic is described on the dental practice IT support page.

Why phones and IT belong with one company in a dental office

Ten years ago a phone system was a box on the wall with its own wiring, and a phone vendor made sense. That is no longer how it works. Today's desk phones plug into the same Cat6 jacks as the computers, draw power from the same network switch, and reach the phone service over the same internet connection. The phone system is, in every practical sense, part of the network.

That changes who should support it:

• Call quality depends on the switch. Voice traffic needs to be prioritized over a file transfer or a CBCT scan. That is a switch setting, and whoever manages the switch has to make it.
• Outages are shared. When the internet drops, phones and cloud software drop together. The failover that keeps one running keeps the other running.
• Security overlaps. Phone systems have admin portals and user logins. They need the same multi-factor authentication and offboarding as email.
• Moves and adds are network work. Adding a phone to a new consult room means a jack, a switch port and a phone profile. Three tasks, one provider.

The broader version of this argument, for any small business, is in computers and phones from one IT company. For a dental clinic it is stronger, because the phones are how patients book, confirm and cancel, and the network they ride on is also carrying your X-rays.

What does a dental clinic actually need from a phone system?

More than "it rings". A dental front desk handles new-patient calls, confirmations, insurance questions, specialist referrals, emergency calls after hours and a steady stream of texts. Here is what I set up on a clinic phone system, in order of how much difference it makes:

1. An auto attendant that gets out of the way. A short greeting, a press-one for scheduling and a press-two for billing, and a fast path to a person. Patients in pain do not want a menu.
2. Office-hours routing. Calls ring the front desk during hours and switch automatically to the after-hours flow at closing, with holiday schedules programmed once a year.
3. After-hours emergency routing. A caller who chooses the emergency option reaches the on-call dentist's cell phone, while everything else goes to voicemail. The dentist's personal number stays hidden.
4. Voicemail to email. Messages arrive in the front desk inbox as audio files with a transcript, so nothing sits unheard on a blinking light.
5. Texting from the office number. Confirmations, running-late messages and directions go out from the same number patients already know.
6. Ring groups. The front desk phones ring together, and an overflow rule sends the third simultaneous call to the office manager or a second location.
7. Caller ID that shows the patient. Where your practice software supports it, the patient record pops up when they call.
8. A mobile app. The office manager can answer the office line from a cell phone on a snow day, and calls from the app show the office number, not a personal one.
9. Cloud fax. Referrals and insurance documents arrive as PDFs in a secure mailbox rather than on paper in the hallway.
10. Call reporting. Missed-call and hold-time numbers, so you know whether the front desk needs help at 8 AM on Mondays.

All of this is standard on a cloud system such as Cleod 9 Voice. Almost none of it is practical on old copper phone lines, which is why the next section matters.

Cloud VoIP versus traditional phone lines for a dental office

Many dental clinics in Dallas are still on phone lines from the telephone company, or on an older on-premise phone box that a vendor installed years ago. Here is how the two approaches compare for a clinic:

The one honest point in favor of copper lines is that they work when the power and internet are out. In practice the clinic cannot see patients under those conditions anyway, and automatic forwarding to a cell phone covers the calls. For nearly every dental clinic I see, a cloud system is the right answer, and the savings on the old lines often cover the new one.

What the network needs for good call quality

When a cloud phone system sounds bad, the phone service is rarely the cause. The network is. Voice traffic is small but impatient: it needs to arrive on time, in order, without gaps. A file transfer can tolerate a delay; a phone call cannot. Here is what I put in place so calls sound clean in a busy clinic:

• A switch that powers the phones and prioritizes voice. Desk phones draw power over the network cable, so the switch must supply it. The switch is also set to move voice packets ahead of everything else, so an image transfer from the pan room does not turn a call into robot speech.
• Phones on their own network segment. I keep voice separate from practice devices and from patient guest Wi-Fi, so a waiting room full of phones streaming video cannot touch call quality.
• Wired phones, not Wi-Fi. Desk phones plug into Cat6. Wireless is for the mobile app, not for the front desk.
• A firewall configured for voice. Some firewalls, particularly consumer models, interfere with phone traffic in ways that cause one-way audio or dropped calls. The business firewall I install is set correctly for it.
• Enough internet, with failover. Calls need very little bandwidth, but they need it to be stable. A second connection from a different carrier keeps the phones up when the primary line is having a bad day.

If your clinic already has cloud phones and they sound bad, the fix is almost always in this list, and it is the same work I would do to make your imaging and practice software behave. The symptoms overlap with the ones in why your dental office network keeps going down.

How I set up a phone system in a dental clinic

Whether it is a new clinic or a switch from an old system, the steps are the same, and the order matters because of the lead times involved:

1. Start the number port first. Moving your existing phone number from the old carrier to the new system takes weeks and cannot be rushed. I file the port on day one so it lands when everything else is ready. The old service stays live until the port completes, so there is no gap.
2. Map the phones. Front desk, office manager, doctor's office, sterilization, consult rooms, break room. Operatories often do not need a desk phone if the practice software handles intercom, and I will say so rather than sell you phones you will not use.
3. Prepare the network. Jacks, switch ports, power over the cable, voice prioritization, the separate voice segment. In a new build-out this is part of the cabling work described in opening a dental practice: IT, cabling and network setup.
4. Build the call flow. I write out the greeting, the menu, the hours, the after-hours emergency path and the holiday schedule with your office manager, then program it. You approve the recorded greeting before it goes live.
5. Deploy the phones. Phones arrive pre-configured. I plug them in, label them, and check every one makes and receives a call.
6. Train the front desk. Fifteen minutes on transfer, hold, park, voicemail and the mobile app. Then I stay reachable for the first week while people get used to it.
7. Cut over. When the port completes, calls arrive on the new system. The old lines get canceled after I have confirmed everything works.

The whole project usually lands in the window the port takes, and the clinic never misses a call during the switch.

What happens to the phones when the internet goes down?

This is the question every office manager asks, and it deserves a straight answer. A cloud phone system needs internet to ring the desk phones. When the internet is out, the desk phones are out. What does not stop is the phone service itself, which lives in the cloud and keeps answering your number.

So I configure two layers of protection:

• Failover internet. A second connection from a different carrier, wired into the firewall, takes over automatically when the primary fails. In most outages the desk phones simply keep working and nobody notices.
• Forwarding rules. If both connections are down, or the power is out, the phone service detects that the office phones are unreachable and forwards calls to the office manager's cell phone, or plays a message and takes voicemail. Patients still reach a person, and the mobile app on a cell phone can make outbound calls that show the office number.

Compare that with an on-premise phone box: when it fails, the number rings to nothing until a vendor arrives. A cloud system on a well-built network with failover is more resilient than what most clinics have today, not less.

What it costs and how the support works

The phone service is billed per user per month by the provider, and I will give you the exact figure for your clinic when I know how many phones and numbers you need. What I do not do is mark up the phones or hide setup fees. Setup is quoted as a project, and ongoing support for the phones is included in the same month-to-month managed IT plan that covers your computers, server, network and practice software. One plan, one point of contact, one number to call.

If you only want the phone system installed and will handle support elsewhere, I can do that on an hourly basis with no contract, though I would encourage you to keep the phones and the network with the same provider for the reasons above.

To start, tell me how many phones you have now, what carrier your number is with, and whether you are opening, moving or replacing an old system. I will come back with a plan and a number. Reach me through the contact page or call (214) 612-7080, which, as it happens, runs on the same kind of system I am describing.

Questions people ask

Written and reviewed by

Anthony Omini, founder of Cross River Tech

Over 15 years in IT across many industries, now running Cross River Tech, a small owner-led managed IT company in Dallas. Every article is written from his own client work and checked by him before it is published.

Phones and computers from one point of contact Tell me how many phones you have and who your number is with, and I will come back with a plan for the phones and the network together.

Ask Anthony(214) 612-7080About Anthony