Tele-Dentistry Consent
If you have any questions please email them to teledental@shchc.org
Introduction:
Southeast Community Health Systems will be utilizing eClinical Works Healow remote communication technology to conduct problem-focused evaluations/re-evaluations virtually, to help manage your oral health problem and to determine whether you have a condition that requires immediate in-office treatment.
Electronic systems used will incorporate network and software security protocols to protect the confidentiality of patient identification and imaging data and will include measures to safeguard the data and to ensure its integrity against intentional or unintentional corruption.
A licensed health care professional who can adequately and accurately assist with access to medical records, orders, and emergency patient care will be in the examination room with the patient at all times that the patient is receiving telemedicine services.
Expected Benefits:
Our dental office is using one or more of the permitted modalities listed above for remote transmission of information to conduct limited problem focused evaluations. While entirely adequate in the vast majority of cases for such limited purposes, these evaluations may not reveal conditions that would be discovered during an office visit or through the use of specialized tele-dental technology.
Possible Risks
During the current pandemic, the federal government announced that it will not enforce HIPAA regulations (privacy for health records) in connection with medical and dental offices’ good faith provision of medical or dental services using non-public facing audio or video remote communications services. Remote patient consultations may take place over applications that allow video chats such as Apple Face Time, Facebook Messenger video chat, Google Hangouts, or Skype and may involve or be based on photos or videos taken with smartphones by the patient and transmitted to the dental office. Please do not contact us using public-facing services such as Facebook Live, Twitch, or TikTok, which are not permitted by the federal government for this purpose.
As always, our office will take dental record confidentiality very seriously, and will do what we can under the circumstances to protect the information you send us. While we believe the risk to such confidentiality is not high, it may be greater than it would be if these remote electronic communications were encrypted, which is one of the main HIPAA requirements that is being relaxed during the nationwide COVID-19 public health emergency.
Certain major dental plans have announced that they will reimburse dental offices for conducting such remote evaluations, and we will submit claims in connection with them.
