The Situation
The practice had grown from one location to three over six years. Their network infrastructure hadn’t grown with them — each location was running consumer-grade routers and a mix of wireless access points with no central management. The practice manager described it as “held together with prayers and phone calls to their ISP.”
The specific problems:
- Unprotected guest Wi-Fi on the same network as patient management software
- No way for IT staff to remotely access systems without physically driving there
- Dead zones throughout two of the three locations
- No centralized management — each location was a separate “island”
What I Built
After an on-site assessment of all three locations, I designed a standardized network deployment using Ubiquiti UniFi equipment throughout.
Each location now runs:
- A UniFi Security Gateway for centralized management and firewall
- Managed switches with 802.1Q VLAN support
- Enterprise-grade access points mounted at proper coverage intervals
- Separate VLANs for: staff/practice management, guest/patient Wi-Fi, and medical devices
The WireGuard VPN implementation gives their IT coordinator a secure tunnel to any location from anywhere, with proper access controls — no more $150 “I drove out there and rebooted the router” service calls.
The Outcome
The practice manager reached out three months after deployment:
“I haven’t gotten a single call about the internet being down. The staff stopped complaining. That alone was worth it.”
The IT coordinator estimated she’s saved about 6 hours per month in on-site visits that are now handled remotely. The security posture improved enough to satisfy their cyber liability insurance auditor on the next renewal cycle.
Total project cost came in significantly under what two managed service providers quoted for the same scope — partly because I don’t charge for recurring monitoring they didn’t need.