​Privacy Policy

A. We have a legal duty to protect the confidentiality of your health information. We are required to protect the confidentiality of your individually identifiable health information (“protected health information” or “PHI”). We must give you notice of our legal duties and privacy practices concerning your PHI:

• We must protect PHI that we have created or received about your past, present, or future health condition, health care we provide to you, or payment for your health care.

• We must notify you about how we will protect your PHI.

• We must explain how, when and why we will use and/or disclose your PHI.

• We may only use and/or disclose PHI as we have described in this Notice.

• We are required to follow the procedures in this Notice. We reserve the right to change the terms of this Notice and to make new notice provisions effective for all PHI that we maintain by:

• Posting the revised Notice in our offices and on the website;

• Making copies of the revised Notice available upon request (either at our offices, on our website or through the contact person listed in this Notice); and

B. We may legally use and disclose your PHI as follows:

1. We may use and disclose PHI about you to provide health care referral for you. We may use and disclose PHI about you to provide, coordinate or manage your health care and related evaluations. This may include communicating with other health care providers regarding your evaluation and coordinating and managing your health care with others. For example, we may use and disclose PHI about you when we send your Health History and Basic Examination Questionnaire to our affiliated physicians for review.

2. We may use and disclose PHI about you to obtain payment for evaluations. Generally, we may use and give your medical information to others to collect payment for the evaluation and evaluations provided to you. We may also share portions of your medical information with the following:

   • ​Collection departments or agencies; and

   • Consumer reporting agencies (e.g., credit bureaus).

3. ​We may use and disclose your PHI for our internal health care operations. We may use and disclose PHI in performing business activities, which we call “health care operations”. These “health care operations” allow us to improve the quality of care we provide and reduce health care costs. Examples of the way we may use or disclose PHI about you for “health care operations” include the following:

   • ​Reviewing and improving the quality, efficiency and cost of care that we provide to you and our other clients. For example, we may use PHI about you to develop ways to assist our health care providers and staff in deciding what medical treatment should be provided to others.

   • Reviewing and evaluating the skills, qualifications, and performance of health care providers taking care of you.

   • Assisting various people who review our activities. For example, PHI may be seen by practitioners reviewing the evaluations provided to you, and by accountants, lawyers, and others who assist us in complying with applicable laws.

   • Planning for our organization’s future operations, and fundraising for the benefit of our organization.

   • Conducting business management and general administrative activities related to our organization and the evaluations it provides, including providing info.

   • Complying with this Notice and with applicable laws.

4. ​We may use and disclose PHI under other circumstances without your prior written authorization. We may use and/or disclose your PHI under a number of circumstances in which you do not have to consent, give authorization or otherwise be given an opportunity to agree or object. Those circumstances include, but are not limited to:

   • ​When the use and/or disclosure is required by law. For example, when a disclosure is required by federal, state or local law or other judicial or administrative proceeding.

   • When the use and/or disclosure is necessary for public health activities. For example, we may disclose your PHI if you have been exposed to a communicable disease or may otherwise be at risk of contracting or spreading a disease or condition.

   • When the disclosure relates to victims of abuse, neglect or domestic violence.

   • When the use and/or disclosure is for health oversight activities. For example, we may disclose your PHI to a state or federal health oversight agency which is authorized by law to oversee our operations.

   • When the disclosure is for judicial and administrative proceedings. For example, we may disclose your PHI in response to an order of a court or administrative tribunal.

   • When the disclosure is for law enforcement purposes.

   • When the use and/or disclosure relates to medical research. Under certain circumstances, we may disclose your PHI for medical research.

5. ​We may contact you to provide appointment reminders. We may use and/or disclose PHI to contact you to provide a reminder to you about an appointment you have for evaluation.

6. We may contact you with information about evaluations, or health care providers. We may use and/or disclose PHI to manage or coordinate your healthcare. This may include telling you about evaluations, and/or other healthcare providers.
   
   Under any circumstances other than those listed above, we will ask for your prior written authorization before we use or disclose your PHI. If you sign a written authorization allowing us to disclose your PHI in a specific situation, you may later cancel your authorization in writing. If you cancel your authorization in writing, we will not disclose your PHI after we receive your cancellation, except for disclosures which were being processed before we received your cancellation.