EMR IT Support in Ontario: What Your Clinic’s Computers, Internet and Backups Need

When the EMR is slow at 9:15 on a Monday, nobody at the front desk cares whose fault it is. They care that patients are lining up. Often, though, the cause isn’t the EMR at all. It’s an old PC, a struggling internet connection or a Wi-Fi access point in the wrong spot. This guide is for practice owners, managers and office leads at Ontario clinics, and it sits alongside our broader guide to IT for healthcare practices.

I’m Jeffrey Bowles, Partner and Director of IT Services at ACT360. Below you’ll find what EMR IT support actually covers, how hosted and local EMRs change the job, what workstations and internet need, how OLIS and HRM fit in, and the questions to ask whoever supports your clinic.

EMR IT support is everything a clinic needs around the EMR software for it to work: workstations, printers and scanners, internet and Wi-Fi, logins and security, backups, and someone who knows whether to call the vendor or fix it in-house.

Your EMR vendor supports the application. Your IT partner supports the environment it runs in. Problems land in the gap between them more often than people expect, so it helps to see the split laid out.

The server rows come from OntarioMD’s EMR certification FAQ, which says a hosted EMR provider handles systems management functions, including disaster recovery, data security, business continuity and server infrastructure, while with a local EMR the physician or group is responsible for them. Every other row is the practice’s either way.

A hosted EMR moves the server, its security and its backups to the vendor. A local EMR keeps all of that in your clinic, which means someone has to patch, monitor and back up that server every week.

Most Ontario practices have already made the move. OntarioMD’s vendor-reported numbers (as of October 22, 2026) count 27,509 community physicians and nurse practitioners on OntarioMD-certified EMRs, and 25,287 of them, about 92%, on a hosted deployment. The largest offerings by users are PS Suite, Accuro and OSCAR Professional.

If you’re one of the roughly 2,200 still on a local server, that’s not automatically wrong. It does mean the server is a single point of failure that your practice owns. In the ransomware case the Information and Privacy Commissioner of Ontario summarized from PHIPA Decision 249, attackers encrypted a medical imaging clinic’s electronic medical records and file-sharing servers and deleted its backups. The clinic had to close temporarily. A local EMR needs the same care as any critical server: patching, monitoring, admin rights kept to a few people, and a backup copy an attacker can’t reach.

Thinking about moving to hosted? Ask where the data will live. ACT360 recommends EMR hosting in Canadian data centres, with a signed agreement covering how the vendor handles patient data.

A supported operating system first, then enough memory and a reliable connection. Windows 10 stopped receiving security updates on October 14, 2025, so any PC still running it is an unpatched machine with access to patient charts.

Microsoft’s lifecycle page confirms the Windows 10 end-of-support date. In a clinic, the old PCs tend to hide in exam rooms and at the nursing station, where nobody thinks of them as computers so much as part of the room. Those are the first machines to list.

• Check your EMR vendor’s current requirements. Each vendor publishes supported operating systems and browsers, and they change with each release. A machine that met them three years ago may not now.
• Treat peripherals as part of the EMR. Document scanners, label and requisition printers and signature pads all need drivers that work with your EMR version. Keep a list of models and test one of each before a Windows or EMR update rolls out to the whole clinic.
• Standardize. Three or four identical PC models are much easier to support, replace and keep patched than one of everything.
• Plan replacements on a cycle. Replacing a few machines each year beats replacing the whole clinic the month a vendor drops support.

More than the minimum on the vendor’s sheet, and two connections rather than one. With a hosted EMR, the internet connection is the clinic. If it drops, charting, scheduling and billing stop together.

For a sense of scale, the vendor-supplied details for Accuro’s hosted offering on OntarioMD’s certified EMR listing give a floor of 60 kbps per user but recommend 10 Mbps down and 5 Mbps up, with latency at or below 20 milliseconds. The same listing says customers provide their own workstations, network, internet connection and peripherals. That information comes from the vendor and may not reflect its latest release, so check your own vendor’s current numbers. The pattern holds, though: latency and reliability matter as much as raw speed.

1. Get a second connection from a different provider, ideally over a different type of line, with a firewall that switches over on its own.
2. Fix the Wi-Fi in exam rooms. Clinicians charting on laptops in rooms with poor signal will blame the EMR. A proper survey and business-grade access points usually end the complaints.
3. Keep patient Wi-Fi off the clinic network. Guests in the waiting room should never share a network with the computers that open charts.

Through your EMR, if it’s OntarioMD-certified. OLIS delivers lab orders and results from hospitals, community labs and public health labs, and HRM delivers hospital reports such as discharge summaries straight into patient charts.

OntarioMD’s OLIS page says clinicians using an OntarioMD-certified EMR can access the latest lab results for their patients or query OLIS. Its Health Report Manager page describes HRM as securely delivering medical record reports and narrative diagnostic imaging reports from participating hospitals and specialty clinics into clinicians’ EMRs. OntarioMD’s certification FAQ adds that only certified EMR offerings can connect to provincial services like OLIS and HRM.

Here’s the IT detail that catches clinics out. HRM only delivers to locations it trusts, and OntarioMD asks for at least 7 business days’ notice to [email protected] before a change of internet provider or EMR provider. Switch internet providers without telling them and hospital reports can quietly stop arriving. Put that step in any internet or office move plan.

It depends on where the data lives. With a hosted EMR, the vendor backs up the EMR itself, but your scanned documents, exports and other files still need your own backup. With a local EMR, the whole job is yours.

• Hosted EMR: ask the vendor, in writing, how often they back up, where the copies are kept, and how they would restore your data. Then back up everything that lives outside the EMR: shared folders, scanned documents waiting to be filed, reports and spreadsheets.
• Local EMR: back up the server every night and keep a copy offline. OntarioMD’s general counsel gave the same advice in a Medical Post article republished by OntarioMD: if data isn’t stored in the cloud, back it up locally every night and store it offline.
• Either way: test a restore on a schedule and write down how long it took. A backup nobody has restored is a hope, not a plan.

Our business continuity and disaster recovery page covers how we plan backups and recovery around the systems a practice can’t work without.

By securing the people and devices that reach the EMR. Most clinic incidents start with a phished password, a former employee’s account or an unpatched PC, not a flaw in the EMR software.

Give every person their own login, turn on MFA wherever the EMR and Microsoft 365 support it, remove access the day someone leaves, and encrypt every laptop that leaves the building. Our page on cybersecurity for healthcare practices in Ontario walks through the common ways attackers get into clinics and what closes each one.

Security and privacy obligations overlap here. Under PHIPA, your practice is the custodian, whatever your EMR vendor’s compliance statement says. Our page on PHIPA compliance for healthcare practices covers the safeguards PHIPA expects and the records to keep for breach reporting.

Ask these 7 questions of your current IT provider, or any you’re considering. The answers show whether they understand how a clinic runs around its EMR, or just support computers in general.

1. When the EMR is slow, how do you decide if it’s ours or the vendor’s problem, and will you call the vendor for us?
2. Which of our PCs are out of support, and what’s the replacement plan?
3. What happens to the clinic if the internet goes down at 10 a.m. on a Tuesday?
4. Will you test scanners and printers with our EMR before rolling out updates?
5. Who removes a departing employee’s access to the EMR, email and files, and how fast?
6. What gets backed up outside the EMR, and when did you last test a restore?
7. Will you remember to tell OntarioMD before we change internet providers?

Vague answers to the first and last questions are a sign the provider hasn’t spent much time in clinics.

We start with how your clinic runs, not with a list of products. Through the Assess and Comprehend steps of our ACTION approach, we inventory your workstations and peripherals, check operating systems and internet connections, map where patient data lives inside and outside the EMR, and ask your front desk where the day actually breaks down. Then we work alongside your EMR vendor rather than around them, so you have one call to make when something goes wrong.

Ongoing support sits inside ACT360 Managed IT, priced per user per month, with a 90-day exit clause. For how that budget breaks down by practice size, see IT support costs for healthcare providers.

A clinic’s EMR is only as dependable as the PCs, connection and habits around it. Replace what’s out of support, give the internet a backup, keep OntarioMD in the loop when you change providers, and write down who owns each problem. Those four steps head off a lot of bad mornings.

If you’d like a second opinion on your setup, our free IT Readiness Assessment looks at your workstations, internet, EMR setup and backups and gives you a short list of what to fix first. You can also call 705-739-2281 or email [email protected].