Effective Date: 8/17/2022
Health Information Privacy (HIPAA)
The Health Insurance Portability & Accountability Act of 1996 (“HIPAA”) requires that all medical records and other individually identifiable health information to be kept confidential. HIPAA gives you the right to understand and control how your health Information is used. There are penalties for misuse of personal health information.
What’s Protected
- Information your doctors, nurses, and other health care providers put in your medical record
- Conversations your doctor has about your care or treatment with nurses/others
- Information about you in your health insurer’s computer system
- Billing information about you at your clinic
- Most other health information about you held by those who must follow this law
How It’s Protected
Covered entities (healthcare providers and others who are bound by HIPAA) must:
- put in place safeguards to protect your health information.
- reasonably limit uses and disclosures to the minimum necessary to accomplish their intended purpose.
- have contracts in place with their contractors and others ensuring that they use and disclose your health information properly and safeguard it appropriately.
- have procedures in place to limit who can view and access your health information as well as implement training programs for employees about how to protect your health information.
Who Can See and Receive Your Health Information
Your health information can be used and shared:
- For your treatment and care coordination
- To pay doctors and hospitals for your health care and to help run their businesses
- With your family, relatives, friends, or others involved with your health care or your health care bills, unless you object
- To make sure doctors give good care and nursing homes are clean and safe
- To protect public health, such as reporting when the flu is in your area
- To make required reports to the police, such as reporting gunshot wounds
Unless this law allows it, your health information cannot be used or shared without your written permission. Your healthcare provider generally is not allowed to:
- Give information to your employer
- Use or share your information for marketing or advertising purposes
- Share private notes about your health care
For more information about consumer privacy rights, visit the government Health & Human Services website.
Our Use of Cookies
A cookie is a file containing an identifier (a string of letters and numbers) that is sent by a web server to a web browser and is stored by the browser. The identifier is then sent back to the server each time the browser requests a page from the server. Cookies may be either “persistent” cookies or “session” cookies: a persistent cookie will be stored by a web browser and will remain valid until its set expiry date, unless deleted by the user before the expiry date; a session cookie, on the other hand, will expire at the end of the user session, when the web browser is closed. Cookies do not typically contain any information that personally identifies a user, but personal information that we store about you may be linked to the information stored in and obtained from cookies.
We use cookies for the following purposes:
Authentication – we use cookies to identify you when you visit our website and as you navigate our website
Status – to help us to determine if you are logged into our website
Security – we use cookies as an element of the security measures used to protect user accounts, including preventing fraudulent use of login credentials, and to protect our website and services generally.
Analysis – we use cookies to help us to analyze the use and performance of our website and services
We use Google Analytics to analyze the use of our website. Google Analytics gathers information about website use by means of cookies. The information gathered relating to our website is used to create reports about the use of our website. Google’s privacy policy is available at: https://www.google.com/policies/privacy/
Most browsers allow you to refuse to accept cookies and to delete cookies. The methods for doing so vary from browser to browser, and from version to version. You can however obtain up-to-date information about blocking and deleting cookies on your respective browser support site.
Please note that blocking cookies may have a negative impact on the functions of many websites, including our site. Some features of our site may not be available to you.
Changes to the Privacy Policy
We may change this Privacy Policy from time to time. The most recent version of the Privacy Policy will always be posted on our website, with the “Effective Date” posted at the top of the Policy. We may revise and update this Privacy Policy if our practices change, as technology changes, or as we add new services or change existing ones. If we make any material changes to our Privacy Policy or how we handle your personal information, or we are going to use any personal information in a manner that is materially different from that stated in our Privacy Policy at the time we collected such information, we will give you a reasonable opportunity to consent to the change. If you do not consent, your personal information will be used as agreed to under the terms of the privacy policy in effect at the time we obtained that information. By using our site or services after the Effective Date, you are deemed to consent to our then-current privacy policy. We will use information previously obtained in accordance with the Privacy Policy in effect when the information was obtained from you.