When Your Internet Drops, Your Entire Practice Stops
Connectivity Built for Medical and Dental Practices
The Connectivity Challenge
You didn’t study medicine or dentistry to spend your mornings troubleshooting internet outages. But when your connection drops, everything stops. Best Practice or MedicalDirector can’t reach the server. Medicare online claiming goes offline — and your reception team starts handwriting patient details on paper, hoping they can process everything once the system comes back. Telehealth appointments disconnect mid-consultation. EFTPOS terminals won’t process payments. The appointment system stops sending reminders.
For a busy practice seeing 30 to 50 patients a day, even an hour of downtime creates a cascade of problems that takes the rest of the day to untangle. Patients who couldn’t pay need to be followed up. Claims that couldn’t be submitted need to be manually rebatched. Referrals that came through by fax — and yes, pathology results and referral letters still come by fax — pile up unprocessed.
The challenge is compounded by the fact that most internet providers don’t understand the urgency. When you call your ISP to report an outage, you’re in the same queue as every other customer. The support agent doesn’t know that your practice is haemorrhaging revenue at $200 or more per hour. They don’t understand that a Medicare claiming outage means real patients are walking out without being billed. You’re given a ticket number and told to wait.
Meanwhile, your practice is running digital imaging systems that generate enormous files. A single panoramic dental X-ray can be 10 to 30 megabytes. A CBCT scan can exceed 100 megabytes. These files need to upload to cloud storage, sync between workstations, and sometimes transmit to specialists for review. On a congested NBN connection shared with the residential street around you, that upload can grind to a halt during peak hours — precisely when your practice is busiest.
Then there’s telehealth. Since Medicare made telehealth items permanent in January 2022, video consultations have become a standard part of general practice. But telehealth requires low latency and consistent bandwidth. When your connection is struggling under the load of Medicare claiming, imaging uploads, and a waiting room full of patients on their phones, the video quality suffers. Pixelation, audio delay, and dropped sessions don’t just frustrate patients — they undermine clinical care.
Your practice needs an internet connection that treats these systems as mission-critical, because they are. And you need a provider who understands that when your connection goes down, patients are affected.
How Summit Helps Medical and Dental Practices
Reliable Primary Internet That Doesn't Compete with Your Neighbours
Summit’s fixed wireless network is business-only infrastructure. Your practice’s connection isn’t shared with the residential users on your street who are streaming video every evening. It’s a dedicated business-grade link on a network we own and operate under ACMA Carrier Licence #388.
This means consistent performance during your practice hours — reliable bandwidth for Medicare claiming, telehealth consultations, and digital imaging uploads, without the congestion that plagues shared NBN connections in busy suburban areas.
Fixed wireless also delivers symmetrical speed options, which matters when your dental practice is uploading large imaging files. On a typical NBN connection, your download speed might be adequate but your upload speed is a fraction of that. Summit’s fixed wireless can deliver the upload bandwidth your imaging workflow actually needs.
Fax to Email - Because Healthcare Still Runs on Fax
Pathology results. Specialist referral letters. Hospital discharge summaries. Reports from allied health providers. Despite every attempt to digitise healthcare communication, fax remains deeply embedded in the referral and results workflow.
Summit’s fax to email service lets your practice receive faxes as email attachments and send faxes from your computer — without maintaining a physical fax machine, a dedicated phone line, or a toner budget. Incoming faxes arrive as PDFs in your nominated inbox. No machine jams. No paper waste. No missed faxes because the line was busy.
For practices that still receive a significant volume of referrals and pathology results by fax, this is a quiet but meaningful operational improvement.
4G Backup That Kicks In Automatically
For a medical or dental practice, a 4G backup connection isn’t a luxury — it’s the difference between billing your patients and writing their details on paper. Summit’s 4G backup service monitors your primary connection and fails over automatically when it detects an outage. Your practice management system reconnects. Medicare claiming continues. EFTPOS keeps processing.
Your reception staff shouldn’t even need to know the failover happened. The systems stay online, the patients keep being seen, and the claims keep being submitted.
Fast Deployment -- Your Practice Can't Wait Months
When you’re opening a new practice, relocating, or simply fed up with your current provider, you need connectivity in days, not months. Summit’s fixed wireless service can be installed in as little as 10 business days. If we don’t meet that commitment, your first month is free.
Compare that to the weeks or months you might wait for an NBN connection, and the choice becomes straightforward.
Hosted PBX Designed for Practice Workflows
Your phone system handles more than just incoming calls. It manages after-hours routing for emergencies, directs callers through a menu to the right department, sends appointment reminders, and queues calls during your busiest periods so patients aren’t met with a busy signal.
Summit’s FlexPBX hosted phone system gives your practice:
- IVR (Interactive Voice Response) — ‘Press 1 for appointments, press 2 for results, press 3 for emergencies’ — so patients reach the right person without tying up your reception desk
- After-hours routing — direct emergency calls to the on-call practitioner and non-urgent calls to voicemail
- Ring groups — distribute incoming calls across multiple reception staff during peak hours
- Voicemail to email — receive voicemail messages as audio files in your inbox for easy review between patients
- Call recording — maintain records of patient communications for quality and compliance purposes
- Time-based routing — automatically switch call flows between business hours, lunch breaks, and after hours
And because Summit provides both your internet and your phone system, we can prioritise voice traffic on our network. Your call quality doesn’t degrade when someone uploads an X-ray.
Services That Matter to MSPs
| Service | Why It Matters to Your Practice |
|---|---|
| Fixed Wireless Internet | Business-only network with symmetrical speed options for imaging uploads |
| Business NBN | Available where NBN is the right fit, with static IP included |
| 4G Backup | Automatic failover so Medicare claiming and EFTPOS never go offline |
| Hosted PBX (FlexPBX) | After-hours routing, IVR menus, appointment reminders, and voicemail to email |
| Fax to Email | Receive pathology results and referrals without a physical fax machine |
| SIP Trunks | Keep your existing phone system and connect it to Summit's network |
| 1300 Numbers | A single, memorable number for patients across multiple practice locations |
| Static IP | Required for secure VPN access to your practice management server |
Frequently Asked Questions
How does 4G backup work with Medicare online claiming?
When your primary internet connection drops, Summit's 4G backup activates automatically. Your practice management system reconnects through the backup link, and Medicare online claiming continues to function. The failover is designed to be seamless -- your reception team may not even notice the switch.
Do we still need a phone line for our fax machine?
Not with Summit's fax to email service. Incoming faxes are received as PDF attachments in your email, and you can send faxes from your computer. This eliminates the need for a physical fax machine and a dedicated phone line while maintaining your ability to receive pathology results, referrals, and other faxed documents.
What internet speed do you recommend for a typical practice?
For a small practice with 2 to 4 practitioners running practice management software, Medicare claiming, and occasional telehealth, we'd recommend a minimum of 25/25 Mbps on fixed wireless. For practices with heavy digital imaging (dental X-rays, CBCT), multiple concurrent telehealth sessions, or larger staff numbers, 50/50 Mbps or higher is advisable. We'll assess your specific requirements during a free consultation.
How long does installation take?
Summit's fixed wireless service can be installed in as little as 10 business days. If we don't meet that timeframe, your first month is on us. Business NBN provisioning depends on NBN Co timelines, but we manage the process from start to finish.
Is your network secure enough for patient data?
Summit's network supports the security requirements of healthcare practices, including static IP addresses for secure VPN access, encrypted connections, and the ability to implement network configurations aligned with the ACSC Essential Eight framework. We're an ACMA-licensed carrier operating our own infrastructure -- your data traverses a network we control, not one we're renting from someone else.
Why Medical and Dental Practices Choose Summit
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We Understand That Downtime Means Patients Can't Be Billed
When your internet drops, your reception team can’t submit Medicare claims. Patients leave without paying. Your day’s revenue is delayed or lost. Summit’s combination of own-network reliability and automatic 4G backup is specifically designed to prevent this scenario. We don’t treat your practice like just another business connection — we understand that your systems are patient-facing and revenue-critical.
Your Connection Isn't Shared with Residential Users
Summit’s fixed wireless network serves business customers exclusively. Your practice’s bandwidth isn’t competing with the families on your street streaming video at 6pm. This means consistent performance during your practice hours, when your systems need it most.
Melbourne-Based Support That Answers the Phone
When you call Summit, you speak to a Melbourne-based technician who understands your urgency. Not an offshore call centre. Not a chatbot. A person who can look at your connection in real time and tell you what’s happening and when it will be resolved.
One Provider for Everything
Internet, phones, fax, and mobile — all from Summit. One bill. One support number. One provider who understands your complete telecommunications environment. No more blame-shifting between your ISP, your phone provider, and your mobile carrier.
Your Patients Depend on Your Systems. Your Systems Depend on Your Connection.
Talk to Summit about a connectivity solution built around the way your practice actually works — Medicare claiming, telehealth, digital imaging, and all.