Hello,

Mike here and I have a question in regards as to if there is a hipaa violation in the following scenario. A University has a dental college and after closing they have a dental on call person for emergencies. A patient who calls the dental office emergency line gets the University's Public Safety evening or late evening dispatcher, who have no medical traing other than sometimes CPR. The patients are basicly asking for help due to dental work or problems there from, which pertains to the work done at the University dental school. The dispatcher fields the call, even sometimes gives them aspirin or band aid advice, and then pages the on call dental person to call them and relay the patient's problem and number so the on call can contact them. I have no idea, other than it must be cheaper, as to why Public Safety is involved in the process... open to liabilty in my opinion. Pleas advise and thanks!

Mike

LearningAsIGo

I doubt there is an issue here. Any time you call a doctor's office, the people answering the phone/scheduling appoitments are not clinically trained medical employees. However, any person working in a medical office has to sign a HIPPA privacy agreement and most likely have to watch a HIPPA training video once/year.
This system is widely used for any on-call doctor situation.... during work or after hours. The University's "Public Safety" employees are probably better able to field these calls than if they hired a bunch of phone operators to do the same job. At least these people have some training to Triage the situation.