THIS NOTICE DESCRIBES HOW MEDICAL INFORMATION ABOUT YOU MAY BE USED AND DISCLOSED AND HOW YOU CAN GET ACCESS TO THIS INFORMATION. PLEASE REVIEW IT CAREFULLY.
This Notice of Privacy Practices describes how we may use and disclose your protected health information (PHI) to carry out treatment, payment, or health care operations (TPO) and for other purposes that are permitted or required by law. It also describes your rights to access and control your protected health information. “Protected Health Information” is information about you, including demographic information, that may identify you and that relates to your past, present or future physical or mental health or condition and related health care services.
- Uses and Disclosures of Protected Health Information
Uses and Disclosures of Protected Health Information
Your protected health information may be used and disclosed by your physician, our office staff and others outside of our office that are involved in your care and treatment for the purpose of providing health care services to you, to pay your health care bills, to support the operation of the physician’s practice, and any other use required by law.
Treatment: We will use and disclose your protected health information to provide, coordinate, or manage your health care and any related services. This includes the coordination or management of your health care with a third party. For example, we would disclose your protected health information, as necessary, to a home health agency that provides care to you. As another example, your protected health information may be provided to a physician to whom you have been referred to ensure that the physician has the necessary information to diagnose or treat you.
Payment: Your protected health information will be used, as needed, to obtain payment for your health care services. For example, obtaining approval for a hospital stay may require that your relevant protected health information be disclosed to your health plan to obtain approval for the hospital admission.
Healthcare Operations: We may use or disclose, as needed, your protected health information in order to support the business activities of your physician’s practice. These activities include, but are not limited to, quality assessment activities, employee review activities, training of medical students, licensing, and conducting or arranging for other business activities. For example, we may disclose your protected health information to medical school students that see patients at our office. In addition, we may use a sign-in sheet at the registration desk where you will be asked to sign your name and indicate your physician. We may also call you by name in the waiting room when your physician is ready to see you. We may use or disclose your protected health information, as necessary, to contact you to remind you of your appointment.
Permitted Uses and Disclosures: We may use or disclose your protected health information in the following situations without your authorization. These situations include:
As Required By Law: We may disclose your protected health information in any circumstances where the law requires us to do so.
Public Health: We may disclose your protected health information for certain public health activities such as preventing or controlling disease, reporting child abuse or neglect, or disclosing potential exposure to a communicable disease.
Abuse or Neglect: We may disclose your protected health information to the appropriate government authority if we reasonably believe you are a victim of abuse, neglect, or domestic violence.
Health Oversight: We may disclose your protected health information to agencies responsible for health oversight activities, such as audits, investigations, or licensure actions. Under the law, we must make
disclosures to you and when required by the Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services to investigate or determine our compliance with the requirements of Section 164.500.
Legal Proceedings: If you are involved in a lawsuit or a dispute, we may disclose protected health information about you in response to a court or administrative order. We may also disclose protected health information about you in response to a subpoena, discovery request, or other lawful process by someone else involved in the dispute, but only if efforts have been made to tell you about the request (which may include written notice to you) or to obtain an order protecting the information requested.
Law Enforcement: We may disclose your protected health information to law enforcement if asked to for certain reasons, such as to provide evidence about criminal conduct.
Coroners, Funeral Directors, and Organ Donation: We may disclose protected health information about people who have died to coroners, medical examiners, or funeral directors. We may also make disclosures to agencies that are responsible for getting and transplanting organs.
Research: We may reveal your protected health information in connection with certain research activities after going through a special approval process.
Fundraising: We may use or disclose limited protected health information to communicate with you regarding fundraising, of which you may opt out. We will not condition your treatment or payment options on your decision.
Serious Threats to Health or Safety: We may disclose your protected health information if it is needed to prevent a serious threat to the health or safety of a person or the public.
Specialized Government Functions: We may disclose your protected health information for certain specialized government functions, such as military and veteran activities if you are a member of the armed forces, national security and intelligence activities, and correctional institution activities if you are an inmate.
Workers’ Compensation: We may disclose protected health information to workers’ compensation programs or other programs which provide benefits for work-related injuries or illness.
To Individuals Involved in Your Care or Payment for Your Care: We may disclose protected health information about you to a friend or family member who is involved in your medical care, or for notice purposes. We may also give information to someone who helps pay for your care. You may request that any part of your protected health information not be disclosed to family members or friends who may be involved in your care or for notification purposes as described in this Notice of Privacy Practices.
Special Categories of Information: In some circumstances, your protected health information may be restricted in a way that limits some of the uses and disclosures described in this notice. For example, there are special restrictions on the use or disclosure of certain categories of information—e.g. tests for HIV or treatment for mental health conditions or alcohol and drug abuse. Government health benefit programs, such as Medicaid, may also limit the disclosure of beneficiary information for purposes unrelated to the program.
- Other Uses of Protected Health Information
Other uses and disclosures of protected health information not covered by this notice, or the laws that apply to us, will be made only with your written permission. Most uses and disclosures of psychotherapy notes, uses and disclosures for marketing, and disclosures that would be a sale of protected health information, require your written permission. If you provide us permission to use or disclose such protected health information about you, you may revoke that permission, in writing, at any time. If you revoke your permission, this will stop any further use or disclosure of such protected health information for the purposes covered by your written authorization, except if we have already acted in reliance on your permission. 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.
- Your Rights
The following is a statement of your rights with respect to your protected health information.
You have the right of access to inspect and copy your protected health information.
Under federal law, however, you may not inspect or copy the following records: psychotherapy notes; information compiled in reasonable anticipation of, or use in, a civil, criminal, or administrative action or proceeding; and protected health information that is subject to any other law that prohibits access to protected health information. You may also request that your PHI be sent to the designated individual. However, your request may be subject to denial and the Company may charge a reasonable fee for the fulfillment of your request.
You have the right to request a restriction of your protected health information. This means you may ask us not to use or disclose any part of your protected health information for the purposes of treatment, payment or healthcare operations. Your request must state the specific restriction requested and to whom you want the restriction to apply. In most cases, your physician is not required to agree to a restriction that you may request. If your physician believes it is in your best interest to permit use and disclosure of your protected health information, your protected health information will not be restricted. You then have the right to use another Healthcare Professional. However, we must agree to your request for a restriction on the disclosure of protected health information to a health plan for a payment or health care operations purpose, and the protected health information relates only to a health care item or service for which we have been paid out-of-pocket in full by you or someone on your behalf.
You have the right to request to receive confidential communications from us by alternative means or at an alternative location. You have the right to obtain a paper copy of this notice from us, upon request, even if you have agreed to accept this notice alternatively i.e. electronically.
You may have the right to have your physician amend your protected health information. If we deny your request for amendment, you have the right to file a statement of disagreement with us and we may prepare a rebuttal to your statement and will provide you with a copy of any such rebuttal.
You have the right to receive an accounting of certain disclosures we have made, if any, of your protected health information.
- How we protect your data
We keep your information safe by encrypting your data, protecting our networks, applications, and systems, and only allowing certain staff access to your data. We keep your information for ten (10) years at which point we securely destroy it by security erasing or destroying your data. Data is securely stored in physically secured facilities with limited access. Steps are taken to secure your data logically and physically from loss theft or accidental disclosure when at rest encryption, encryption in transit in our high-level security architecture functions. When your data is no longer needed by the organization or you have requested its removal, the data is then disposed of in a secure manner within ten years.
- Changes to this Notice
We reserve the right to change the terms of this notice. We reserve the right to make the revised or changed notice effective for protected health information we already have about you as well as any information we receive in the future. We will inform you by mail of any changes, and the new notice will be available upon request. You then have the right to object or withdraw as provided in this notice. - Complaints
You may report a complaint to our Privacy Officer at 3700 Commerce Parkway, Miramar, FL 33025 by mail or call 844-215-4264 or to the Secretary of Health and Human Services if you believe your privacy rights have been violated by us. We will not retaliate against you for filing a complaint.
- Our Legal Responsibilities
We are required by law to maintain the privacy of protected health information, provide individuals with this notice of our legal duties and privacy practices with respect to protected health information, abide by the terms of this notice, and notify affected individuals following a breach of unsecured protected health information. If you have any objections to this form or would like further information about your rights or our privacy practices under this notice, please ask to speak with our HIPAA Compliance Officer in person or by phone at our Main Phone Number.
Google reCAPTCHA Privacy Policy
Our primary goal is to provide you an experience on our website that is as secure and protected as possible. To do this, we use Google reCAPTCHA from Google Inc. (1600 Amphitheater Parkway Mountain View, CA 94043, USA). With reCAPTCHA we can determine whether you are a real person, and not a robot or a spam software. By spam we mean any electronically undesirable information we receive involuntarily. Classic CAPTCHAS usually needed you to solve text or picture puzzles to check. With Google’s reCAPTCHA you usually do have to do such puzzles. Most of the times it is enough to simply tick a box and confirm you are not a bot. With the new Invisible reCAPTCHA version you don’t even have to tick a box. In this privacy policy you will find out how exactly this works, and what data is used for it.
What is reCAPTCHA?
reCAPTCHA is a free captcha service from Google that protects websites from spam software and misuse by non-human visitors. This service is used the most when you fill out forms on the Internet. A captcha service is a type of automatic Turing-test that is designed to ensure specific actions on the Internet are done by human beings and not bots. During the classic Turing-test, a person differentiates between bot and human. With Captchas, a computer or software program does the same. Classic captchas function with small tasks that are easy to solve for humans but provide considerable difficulties to machines. With reCAPTCHA, you no longer must actively solve puzzles. The tool uses modern risk techniques to distinguish people from bots. The only thing you must do there, is to tick the text field “I am not a robot”. However, with Invisible reCAPTCHA even that is no longer necessary. reCAPTCHA, integrates a JavaScript element into the source text, after which the tool then runs in the background and analyses your user behaviour. The software calculates a so-called captcha score from your user actions. Google uses this score to calculate the likelihood of you being a human, before entering the captcha. reCAPTCHA and Captchas in general are used every time bots could manipulate or misuse certain actions (such as registrations, surveys, etc.).
Why do we use reCAPTCHA on our website?
We do not want bots or spam software to submit forms on our site. Therefore, we are doing everything we can to stay protected and to offer you the highest possible user friendliness. For this reason, we use Google reCAPTCHA from Google. Thus, we can be pretty sure that we will remain a “bot-free” website. Using reCAPTCHA, data is transmitted to Google to determine whether you genuinely are human. reCAPTCHA thus ensures our website’s and subsequently your security. Without reCAPTCHA it could e.g. happen that a bot would register as many email addresses as possible when registering, in order to subsequently “spam” forums or blogs with unwanted advertising content. With reCAPTCHA we can avoid such bot attacks.
What data is stored by reCAPTCHA?
reCAPTCHA collects personal user data to determine whether the actions on our website are made by people. Thus, IP addresses and other data Google needs for its reCAPTCHA service, may be sent to Google. Within member states of the European Economic Area, IP addresses are almost always compressed before the data makes its way to a server in the USA.
Moreover, your IP address will not be combined with any other of Google’s data, unless you are logged into your Google account while using reCAPTCHA. Firstly, the reCAPTCHA algorithm checks whether Google cookies from other Google services (YouTube, Gmail, etc.) have already been placed in your browser. Then reCAPTCHA sets an additional cookie in your browser and takes a snapshot of your browser window.
The following list of collected browser and user data is not exhaustive. Rather, it provides examples of data, which to our knowledge, is processed by Google.
- Referrer URL (the address of the page the visitor has come from)
- IP-address (z.B. 256.123.123.1)
- Information on the operating system (the software that enables the operation of your computers. Popular operating systems are Windows, Mac OS X or Linux)
- Cookies (small text files that save data in your browser)
- Mouse and keyboard behaviour (every action you take with your mouse or keyboard is stored)
- Date and language settings (the language and date you have set on your PC is saved)
- All Javascript objects (JavaScript is a programming language that allows websites to adapt to the user. JavaScript objects can collect all kinds of data under one name)
- Screen resolution (shows how many pixels the image display consists of)
Google may use and analyse this data even before you click on the “I am not a robot” checkmark. In the Invisible reCAPTCHA version, there is no need to even tick at all, as the entire recognition process runs in the background. Moreover, Google have not given details on what information and how much data they retain.
The following cookies are used by reCAPTCHA: With the following list we are referring to Google’s reCAPTCHA demo version at https://www.google.com/recaptcha/api2/demo.
For tracking purposes, all these cookies require a unique identifier
Effective Date: September 20, 2023.
