HIPAA and security

Business Associate Agreement

SmileDesk acts as a Business Associate to every practice that uses it. Every practice accepts our Business Associate Agreement (BAA) when it creates its account, before a single patient message is answered, alongside the Service Agreement. It commits us to use protected health information only to provide the service, to safeguard it, to report any breach without delay, to pass the same obligations to our own vendors, and to return or destroy it within 30 days of the agreement ending. You can read it any time, your Billing page shows who accepted it and when, and we will send a signed paper copy if you ask us.

Our vendors' agreements

SmileDesk is not yet in use with any practice's real patients. Today it answers demonstration and test calls only.

Every company that handles patient data for us (cloud hosting, telephony, AI models, transcription, practice-software connections) signs a Business Associate Agreement before any practice's real patient data reaches it. The current list is available to a practice on request.

Minimum necessary, by design

• The assistant asks only what scheduling and triage need. It is instructed never to request a social security number, card number, or full date of birth over text, and the quality auditor flags any conversation where that rule slips.
• Before revealing anything about an existing appointment, the assistant verifies the patient is texting from the number on file and states the name on file. If either fails, it reveals nothing and hands off to staff.
• One patient's information is never shared with another person, including a spouse or the parent of an adult patient, without verified authorization.
• General questions never require identity: what a crown is, what a deductible means, the office hours. Only questions about a particular person do, and when the assistant cannot verify, it says the same thing whether or not a record exists, so it never hints that someone is a patient.
• If a patient types a card number, a named security code, or a social security number into a text, SmileDesk removes it before the message is stored, read by the assistant, or logged. The assistant sees only that something was removed, thanks the patient, and hands payment to the front desk. Call records are held by our call vendor, and carrier and telephony records by the phone carrier; each signs a BAA with us before any practice's patients call.
• An emergency never waits for verification. A message that reads as a privacy concern (a text that reached the wrong person, a lost phone) stops the assistant from adding any detail and goes straight to the office manager.

Technical safeguards

• Encryption in transit (TLS) and at rest.
• Passwords stored as salted hashes; sessions stored as hashes; password resets are one-time links that expire in an hour.
• Every action the assistant takes (booking, canceling, flagging an emergency, paging the dentist, running an insurance check) is written to an audit log the practice can read.
• Practice data is isolated per practice; staff see only their own practice.
• Daily message caps and a one-click kill switch bound what the assistant can do if something goes wrong.

Clinical boundaries

The assistant never says what a symptom might be, not even as a list of possibilities; it says why the dentist needs to see it. It never diagnoses, never names the treatment a patient will receive, never recommends, names, or changes a medication, over the counter or prescription, and never promises insurance coverage. Emergency-room criteria are given immediately when they apply.

Breach response

If we learn of a breach involving protected health information we notify the affected practice without unreasonable delay and in any case within the time the BAA requires, with what we know, what we are doing, and what the practice should do.

What we ask of practices

• Sign the BAA before real patients text or call.
• Use a healthcare attorney's wording for your patient texting consent; states differ.
• Keep the after-hours emergency number current if paging is on.
• Use strong, unique passwords and remove staff logins when people leave.