Client story · The Ü Clinic
How does a private clinic run its IT without an IT department?
“I can't imagine doing... Running this health service and having to run the IT department myself.”
Dr Shivanthy Sivasothy, GP and co-founder of The Ü Clinic, on growing from one GP and a vision to two consultant-led clinics with Little Big Tech as the IT department.
Watch: The private clinic that runs its IT without an IT department
A CQC-registered clinic with diagnostic machines, day surgery, paperless records and a phone system on the computers. Shiv explains how Little Big Tech keeps all of it running and secure.
2023
Started as a home-visiting GP service
2
Consultant-led clinics today
20+
Users supported
Cyber Essentials
Certified with Little Big Tech
“Little Big Tech is definitely worth every penny that we pay.”
Dr Shivanthy Sivasothy, Co-founder and GP, The Ü Clinic
The challenge
The Ü Clinic grew from one GP and a vision to two multi-specialist clinics in a few years, and every step of that growth put more weight on its IT.
Fully reliant on technology. The clinic is going paperless. Electronic health records, networked clinical machinery and even the phone system all run on the computers. As Shiv puts it, “The Ü Clinic is fully reliant on technology”, which means an IT problem is a patient problem.
Information governance is “really quite hard to navigate”. As a CQC-registered provider handling sensitive data, compliance is a priority, and knowing how to meet it is not something a GP is trained for.
No one in-house to run it. Two sites and multiple employees, but still a small business, run by clinicians whose job is patient care. Running an IT department on top of a health service was never a realistic option.
“it's really quite hard to navigate how to make sure that you are sort of handling information correctly and that we are secure.”
The solution
Networks into both sites. When The Ü Clinic took on its two properties, Little Big Tech put the networks into both sites and connected the clinic's IT to them. Shiv is candid about the alternative: “We just wouldn't have known what to do.”
High-tech clinical equipment connected. Eye diagnostics, laser treatment, whole-body mole mapping and cataract surgery equipment all needed connecting to secure networks. These were “not simple things that we were able to do ourselves”, so Little Big Tech did them.
Support with a person on the end. Every clinic device is monitored, and Little Big Tech supports email, Microsoft and the telephone system. When a ticket goes in, the clinic gets a quick reply from an engineer it knows by name, with fixes explained in plain English.
Cyber Essentials certification. A recent project took The Ü Clinic through Cyber Essentials, so a CQC-registered clinic can show it upholds high standards on keeping sensitive data secure. Shiv: “we wouldn't have been able to do it without them.”
“It's nice to be supported by a person and not a bot.”
Results
- ✓One IT partner from one GP and a vision in 2023 to two consultant-led clinics with more than 20 users, with Little Big Tech seeing the potential early and supporting the growth.
- ✓Cyber Essentials certified, and a clinical founder who says she feels “really reassured and safe” that Little Big Tech is helping with information governance.
- ✓A client with “zero intention of moving to another IT provider”, who calls Little Big Tech “definitely worth every penny that we pay.”
Got questions?
Questions other clinic founders ask
Can't find what you're looking for? Talk to us directly — no sales pitch, no obligation.
“IT is just not the area to try and save money on.”
Who runs IT at your clinic?
Get your practice's free Technology Resilience Score, or talk to the team that supports The Ü Clinic.
Watch the film? Read it instead
Read the full transcript
Hey, I'm Shiv. I'm a co-founder and GP at The Ü Clinic. And we started off, actually it's been quite a journey, but we started off in 2023 as a very small home visiting GP service. And we've now grown to have two clinics that are multi-specialist and consultant-led.
The Ü Clinic is fully reliant on technology and we are trying to become paperless really, so everything from our electronic health records are entirely IT based. A lot of our machinery needs to be connected to networks, and everything from our telephone, even our phone system is, is on the computers.
As a health provider, we are CQC registered. So compliance and information governance is such a priority. It's such a key part of being a safe and sort of secure service for our clients. So that part of it that Little Big Tech have been helping us with has been a game changer, because actually it's really quite hard to navigate how to make sure that you are sort of handling information correctly and that we are secure.
And the reason why I chose Little Big Tech was because I felt that they as a company were understanding of where I was in my journey, having started fairly recently themselves, and could see the potential for our service and my company.
Actually, one of the things that we really appreciate with them is that they will speak to us in sort of non-tech terms to fix problems, where we work with other providers for other services and not sometimes, nearly never, is it the case that they are speaking to us in our language.
So there's been sort, I would sort of say three defining moments for us with Little Big Tech. One was when we got our clinics built, um, when we sort of took on these properties. It was just sort of seeing how they would get, how they got our networks sort of put into, into both sites.
Then the second thing is, uh, there, we have very, very complex high-tech machinery that we use for anything from diagnosing sort of eye conditions to, uh, laser treatments for the eye, mole mapping for the whole body, to operating and doing kind of cataract surgery. So really, really high tech equipment, and quite a few of those needed to be connected up to our networks, and just not simple, simple things that we were able to do ourselves.
And then I would say the third thing is, was becoming Cyber Essentials certified, which really we needed to do it. It was just about how we could kind of stand out from an information governance compliance perspective, and how we could just ensure that we were upholding kind of high standards of keeping quite sort of sensitive data secure.
It's really nice that there's people on the ends of, we put a support ticket in and, and there's, it's, we've got some like people that I sort of feel that we know now, Blake and John and Nick, and it's just, it's nice to be supported by a person and not a bot.
If I was speaking to someone else in my position who might be thinking of starting their own health clinic, I would say that IT is just not the area to try and save money on. And so I just think it is an area that needs a portion of your investment.
If you are thinking of needing IT support, I would highly recommend Little Big Tech.