SCOPE OF POSITION
The PBX Switchboard is a high-volume call center (approx. 50,000/month), communication hub and central information dissemination point for multiple facilities within Ballad Health. This location serves as the centralized patient information dissemination point for all Washington County facilities (JCMC, FWCH, and Woodridge); utilizing SMS for each individual facility. Additionally, PBX Switchboard Operators are responsible for internal routing requests from all Washington County facilities and external routing requests for all Ballad entities including all system-wide hospital facilities, BHMA and Ballad corporate offices in Tennessee, Kentucky and Virginia.
PBX Switchboard Operators are responsible for maintaining and controlling the dissemination of patient information. As part of this responsibility, PBX Operators are responsible for maintaining confidentiality of said patient information including, but not limited to, requests for limited or restricted information release within the federal guidelines set forth by the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA). PBX Operators must be up to date on all HIPAA guidelines as they pertain to the release of patient information.
PBX Operators also act as the Paging Operators for JCMC. This duty consists of maintaining and helping upkeep a master listing of on-call information and contacts for all physicians who take call at Johnson City Medical Center. The operators maintain a dedicated Paging Operator line for use by the hospital staff to request any on-call personnel from physicians to Administrators. In the event the Paging Operator line is busy with calls, the other PBX operators on duty take on the Paging Operator responsibilities. This duty requires the utmost in attention to detail and professional interaction with not only hospital staff and physicians but also physician offices and answering services. Additionally, the PBX Operators maintain a list of physicians’ office numbers, a partial list of physicians’ pagers and also numbers for local emergency and health care-related businesses and organizations (e.g. pharmacies, nursing homes, transport companies, etc.).
PBX Switchboard Operators are responsible for hospital-wide overhead paging. They are responsible for enforcing the operations regarding the utilization of said pages in accordance with the policies set forth by Administration. The PBX Operators maintain logs of exceptions to the paging policy and also logs of pages requested to be announced “stat” for emergency purposes. Additionally, PBX Operators act as backup for initiation of the overhead lullaby chime announcing a birth of a child in the Women’s Center.
This location also serves as the centralized point at JCMC for the monitoring of various alarms for several departments including Engineering and Dietary. This location also serves as the initiation and communication point for all hospital emergency codes including, but not limited to, Code Blue (life-threatening injury or condition), Code Red (fire), Code Echo (evacuation) and Code Pink (infant abduction). PBX Operators initiate the emergency response, serve as an information dissemination point during the code and dispatch additional personnel and resources as needed. These resources may include but are not limited to local fire departments, local law enforcement. PBX operators maintain logs of all Code Blue and Rapid Responders code situations. Additionally, PBX Operators initiate and complete the fire alarm report on which hospital-wide fire alarm responses are based.
PBX Operators serve as the answering service after hours for Medical Center Home Health and Hospice. Duties include obtaining contact information from in-coming callers, paging the respective on-call coordinators, relaying pertinent contact information to coordinators and logging all information in a database for tracking purposes. PBX maintains contact information for Home Health and Hospice personnel for contact purposes.
PBX Operators maintain the centralized location for in-house patient requests. Upon request from patients for assistance with Housekeeping or Engineering issues, PBX Operators log the information, contact the appropriate personnel and relay pertinent information regarding the request.
PBX Operators are responsible for providing outside support for the Web Nursery application. Such support includes maintaining correct mailing information for families, providing password support to parents and relaying appropriate trouble-shooting information to the Web Nursery technology team.
PBX Operators also maintain logs for the following purposes:
1. Fire panel activity, including offline occurrences for maintenance purposes
2. Trauma/”state name” patients for Medical Records verification.
3. AKA names for Admitted patients in compliance with HIPAA guidelines.
4. Long distance calls placed by staff for hospital business.

REPORTING RELATIONSHIP
See Table of Organization.
EDUCATION EXPERIENCE
Good organizational skills and the ability to work independently are critical. Due to the nature of the job, independent decision-making skills and appropriate telephone etiquette are crucial. The ability to communicate, both written and verbally, effectively with employees, patients and physicians is a necessity. Must possess basic computer knowledge—familiarity with Word, Windows and Outlook preferred.