Frisco Primary Care, P.A.

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Notice of Privacy Practices

Effective Date: July 1, 2008

THIS NOTICE DESCRIBES HOW HEALTH INFORMATION ABOUT YOU MAY BE USED AND DISCLOSED AND HOW YOU CAN GET ACCESS TO THIS INFORMATION. PLEASE REVIEW IT CAREFULLY.

If you have any questions about this notice, please contact the Facility Privacy Official by dialing the main office number.

Each time you visit a hospital, physician, or other healthcare provider, a record of your visit is made. Typically, this record contains your symptoms, examination and test results, diagnoses, treatment, a plan for future care or treatment and billing-related information. This notice applies to all of the records of your care generated by the medical office, whether made by medical office personnel, agents of the medical office, or your provider.

Your health insurance, hospitals, and other treatment providers may have different policies or notices regarding the use and disclosure of your health information.

Our Responsibilities:

We are required by law to maintain the privacy of your health information and provide you a description of our privacy practices. We will abide by the terms of this notice.

Uses and Disclosures:

How we may use and disclose Health Information about you.

The following categories describe examples of the way we use and disclose health information:

For Treatment: We may use health information about you to provide you treatment or services. We may disclose health information about you to doctors, nurses, technicians, health students, or other medical office personnel who are involved in taking care of you at the medical office. For example: a doctor treating you for a broken leg may need to know if you have diabetes because diabetes may slow the healing process. Different departments of the medical office also may share health information about you in order to coordinate the different things you may need, such as prescriptions, lab work, meals, and x-rays.

For Payment: We may use and disclose health information about your treatment and services to bill and collect payment from you, your insurance company or a third party payer. For example, we may need to give your insurance company information about your surgery so they will pay us or reimburse you for the treatment. We may also tell your health plan about treatment you are going to receive to determine whether your plan will cover it.

For Health Care Operations: Members of the medical staff and/or quality improvement team may use information in your health record to assess the care and outcomes in your case and others like it. The results will then be used to continually improve the quality of care for all patients we serve. For example, we may also combine health information about many patients to evaluate the need for new services or treatment. We may disclose information to doctors, nurses, and students for educational purposes. And we may combine health information we have with that of other medical offices to see where we can make improvements. We may remove information that identifies you from this set of health information to protect your privacy.

We may also use and disclose health information:

  • To business associates we have contracted with to perform the agreed upon healthcare service and billing for it;
  • To remind you that you have an appointment for medical care;
  • To assess your satisfaction with our services;
  • To tell you about possible treatment alternatives;
  • To tell you about health-related benefits or services;
  • To contact you as part of payment collection efforts;
  • To inform Funeral Directors consistent with applicable law;
  • For conducting internal training programs or reviewing competence of our health care professionals; and
  • When disclosing information, primary appointment reminders, and billing/collections efforts we may leave messages on your answering machine or voice mail.

Business Associates: There are some services provided in our organization through contracts with business associates. Examples include billing services, transcriptionists, and technicians assisting with your care. When these services are contracted, we may disclose your health information to our business associate so that they can perform the job we've asked them to do and bill you or your third-party payer for services rendered. To protect your health information, however, we require the business associate to appropriately safeguard your information.

Individuals Involved in Your Care or Payment for Your Care: We may release health information about you to a friend, family member, or organization who is involved in your medical care or payment of your medical care. In addition, we may disclose health information about you to an entity assisting in a disaster relief effort so that your family can be notified about your condition, status, and location.

Future Communications: We may communicate to you via newsletters, mail outs, telephone, or other means regarding treatment options, health related information, disease-management programs, wellness programs, or other community based initiatives or activities in which our facility is participating.

As required by law, we may also use and disclose health information for the following types of entities, including but not limited to:

  • Food and Drug Administration
  • Public Health or Legal Authorities charged with preventing or controlling disease, injury or disability
  • Correctional Institutions
  • Workers Compensation Agents
  • Organ and Tissue Donation Organizations
  • Military Command Authorities
  • Health Oversight Agencies
  • Funeral Directors, Coroners and Medical Directors
  • National Security and Intelligence Agencies
  • Protective Services for the President and Others

Law Enforcement/Legal Proceedings: We may disclose health information for law enforcement purposes as required by law or in response to a valid subpoena.

State Specific Requirements: Many states have requirements for reporting including population-based activities relating to improving health or reducing healthcare costs. Some states have separate privacy laws that may apply additional legal requirements. If the state privacy laws are more stringent than federal privacy laws, the state law preempts the federal law.

Your Health Information Rights

Although your health record is the physical property of the healthcare practitioner or facility that compiled it, you have the Right to:

Inspect and Copy: You have the right to inspect and obtain a copy of the health information that may be used to make decisions about your care. Usually, this includes medical and billing records, but does not include psychotherapy notes. We may deny your request to inspect and copy in certain very limited circumstances. If you are denied access to health information, you may request that the denial be reviewed. Another licensed healthcare professional chosen by the medical office will review your request and the denial. The person conducting the review will not be the person who denied your request. We will comply with the outcome of the review.

Amend: If you feel that health information we have about you is incorrect or incomplete, you may ask us to amend the information. You have the right to request an amendment for as long as the information is kept by or for the medical office. We may deny your request for an amendment and if this occurs, you will be notified of the reason for the denial.

An Accounting of Disclosures: You have the right to request an accounting of disclosures. This is a list of certain disclosures we make of your health information for purposes other than treatment, payment or healthcare operations where an authorization was not required.

Request Restrictions: You have the right to request a restriction or limitation on the health information we use or disclose about you for treatment, payment, or health care operations. You also have the right to request a limit on the health information we disclose about you to someone who is involved in your care or the payment for your care, like a family member or friend. For example, you could ask that we not use or disclose information about a surgery you had.

We are not required to agree to your request. If we do agree, we will comply with your request unless the information is needed to provide you emergency treatment.

Request Confidential Communications: You have the right to request that we communicate with you about medical matters in a certain way or at a certain location. For example, you can ask that we contact you at work instead of your home. The facility will grant requests for confidential communications at alternative locations and/or via alternative means only if the request is submitted in writing and the written request includes a mailing address where the individual will receive bills for services rendered by the facility and related correspondence regarding payment for services.

Please realize, we reserve the right to contact you by other means and at other locations if you fail to respond to any communication from us that requires a response. We will notify you in accordance with your original request prior to attempting to contact you by other means or at another location.

A Paper Copy of This Notice: You have the right to a paper copy of this notice. You may ask us to give you a copy of this notice at any time. Even if you have agreed to receive this notice electronically, you are still entitled to a paper copy of this notice.

If the facility has a website you may print or view a copy of the notice by clicking on the Notice of Privacy Practices link.

To exercise any of your rights, please obtain the required forms from the Privacy Official and submit your request in writing.

Changes to this Notice

We reserve the right to change this notice and the revised or changed notice will be effective for information we already have about you as well as any information we receive in the future. The current notice will be posted in the medical office and include the effective date.

Complaints

If you believe your privacy rights have been violated, you may file a complaint with the medical office by contacting the main number and asking for the Facility Privacy Official or with the Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services. To file a complaint with the medical office, contact the Privacy Official. All complaints must be submitted in writing.
You will not be penalized for filing a complaint.

Other Uses of Health Information

Other uses and disclosures of health information not covered by this notice or the laws that apply to us will be made only with your written permission. If you provide us permission to use or disclose health information about you, you may revoke that permission, in writing, at any time.

If you revoke your permission, we will no longer use or disclose health information about you for the reasons covered by your written authorization. You understand that we are unable to take back any disclosures we have already made with your permission, and that we are required to retain our records of the care that we provided to you and documented in the doctor's office or clinic.

 

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Frisco Primary Care, P.A. Web Site Privacy Policy

Introduction.   We have created this Privacy Policy in order to demonstrate our firm commitment to privacy and to disclose our practices in gathering, using and disclosing personal information in connection with this Web site. Personal information is information about a person that includes identifying information about that person. Although there are links from this Site to other Web sites, this Privacy Policy applies only to this Site and not to Web sites operated by others. For example, if you click on a link to the Web site of one of our partners or sponsors, the click takes you out of our Site. We are not responsible for the content or privacy practices of other Web sites.

1.  Openness. We follow a general policy of openness regarding our privacy practices.  This Privacy Policy sets out the fair information practices that govern the collection, maintenance, use and disclosure of personal information regarding visitors who use this Site.

2.  Revisions to the Privacy Policy.  We may revise this Privacy Policy from time to time as we add new features or as laws change that may affect our services.  If we make material changes to this Privacy Policy, we will post a new version number at the beginning of this Privacy Policy, consisting of the date (year and month)  the Policy was last revised, so that you will be able to tell when the Privacy Policy was last changed.

3.  Collection of Personal Information.  Except as disclosed in this Policy or as disclosed on other pages in this site where information may be collected, we do not collect personal information about visitors to this Site.

   a.  Web logs.  We maintain standard Web logs that record data about all visitors who use this Site. These logs may contain:

        i.  The Internet domain from which you access this Site (e.g., aol.com, abc.org);

        ii. Your Internet Protocol (IP) address.  Your computer is automatically assigned a number which acts as its IP address when you surf the Internet.  Your IP address is either static (always stays the same) or dynamic (changes from time to time).  A static IP address may be identifiable to you, while a dynamic address is usually not identifiable.

        iii. The type of browser and operating system you use.

        iv. The date and time you visited the Site.

        v. The pages that you saw on this Site.

        vi. The address of the Web site you linked here from. 

We use Web log information to help us design our Site, to identify popular features, and to make the Site more useful for visitors.  Web logs are recorded in sequential files, and we do not normally try to identify individuals from Web logs or use Web logs to gather information about individuals.  However, we may use Web logs to identify any person attempting to break into or damage our Site, and we may share Web log information with law enforcement agencies if we believe that we have evidence of a violation of computer security or related laws.

  b.  Internet Cookies.   We may place Internet cookies on visitors computer hard drives. Internet cookies save data about individuals, such as their name, user-name and the pages they visit on our Site. When a visitor with one of our cookies on his or her computer revisits our Site, we are able to recognize that computer and tailor our Site to be more helpful and efficient for that visitor. Also, cookies help us to provide streamlined services, and to document our transactions with visitors to this Site. You may have software on your computer that will allow you to decline or deactivate Internet cookies, but if you do so, some features of this Site may not work properly for you.

  c.  Visitor /Customer Requests for Information.   If you ask a question or make a request through this Web site, we may store your message and our response for awhile. We may also use this information, and any information you give to us in response to a survey on the Site, to send you information about health-related newsletters, promotional events and upcoming programs that we think you might be interested in; notices of enhancements to our services; additional surveys; and to send you an e-mail version of our physician contact information.

4.  Access, Correction, Deletion and Data Integrity.   Requests to access, correct or delete personal information may be submitted using our contact information.  Please note that we do not consider Web log information to be personal information. Also, we may not be able to delete or revise information about you that we have relied upon to provide services to you, or that we are legally required to maintain.

5.  Use and Disclosure of Personal Information.  We do not sell or rent personal information about visitors to this Site.  We do not use or disclose personal information obtained through this Site except as expressly described in this Policy.   No patient identifying information will be shared or transmitted on this Site.

  a.  Uses.  We use information obtained from weblogs, cookies and visitor requests for the purposes described in this Policy. We also use personal information obtained from this Site to respond to requests, improve our services, demonstrate the quality of our services to our auditors and government agencies that have authority over us, and for the additional purposes described below.

  b.  Disclosures.  We may disclose personal information to any person performing audit, legal, operational or other services for us.  Whenever possible, we will require any recipient of personal information for these purposes to agree in writing to use the information only for the purpose for which it was disclosed and to destroy or return it when no longer needed for that purpose.  We may disclose personal information when required to do so by a subpoena, court order, or search warrant. Except when deemed by us to be infeasible, we will notify the individual of a subpoena, court order or search warrant for the individual information, by e-mail using the e-mail address (if any) that the individual provided to us.

We may disclose personal information as we deem appropriate to protect the safety of an individual or for an investigation related to public safety or to report an activity that appears to be in violation of law.

We may disclose personal information to protect the security and reliability of this Web site, and to take precautions against liability.

We may disclose personal information to any successor in interest (any company or organization that purchases or otherwise takes over our assets).

6.  Public Forums. From time to time this Site may contain message boards and/or news groups (“Forums”).  Please remember that any information disclosed in these areas becomes publicly available. You should exercise caution when deciding to disclose your personal information in these areas. We do not maintain or routinely monitor information posted on any message board or news group on our Site; however, we reserve the right to remove any postings that we deem inappropriate.

7.  Security.  We protect the personal information we have collected from this Site by using industry standard security precautions against loss and unauthorized access, destruction, use, modification or disclosure of that information.We comply with the security safeguards detailed in our computer security policies and procedures, and routinely monitor that compliance. When credit card or other financial information is transmitted over the Internet we use industry standard, SSL (secure socket layer) encryption to protect that information.

8. Children. We do not intend to collect personal information from anyone under age 18. Visitors who wish to participate on our Site and provide personal information indicating that they are under 18 years of age are required to provide the contact information of their parent or guardian. We then send an e-mail message to that parent or guardian alerting them to the child’s request to participate on our Site. We will delete all information about that visitor from our system as quickly as possible. No information collected from users under the age of 18 is used for any marketing or promotional purposes whatsoever.

9.  Questions, Complaints or Requests to Change Information   If at any time you wish to contact us with a question or complaint or to exercise any of the rights set out in this Privacy Policy, or if you want to change any information collected by us, you may do so by contacting us by e-mail, telephone, fax, or U.S. Mail, using the information set out below.

As a high quality network of healthcare providers and healthcare information on the Web, we are continually trying to improve our site. We encourage you to contact us with any suggestions for improving our site so that we can better serve you in the future. Thank you for visiting with us.

 


Advertising Policy

Advertisement and Sponsorship Identification

We believe it is important for you to be able to distinguish advertisements from health information. For this reason, advertisements and sponsorships are clearly identified as being separate from our consumer health information. 

  Advertising Click Through

If you click on an advertisement or link, you will be leaving the site and entering another site. Your computer may receive cookies from other sites and you will not be protected by our Privacy Policy. These sites may place a cookie on your computer for the purposes of ad tracking and presentation. We do not share personally identifiable visitor information with any advertising services.  We may share anonymous aggregated statistical information about uses of this Site.

 


 

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