This is outlined of Healing Touch Rehabilitation Centre’s privacy policy.  This policy applies to all Healing Touch Rehabilitation Centre and its sister companies.  Primary purpose of this policy is to ensure that we keep and maintain all our patient’s information and their records as per Personal Health Information Protection Act (PHIPA) and Federal law of Canada.

 

Our day-to-day operation requires us to collect, use and disclosure of our patients’ personal health information.  Therefore, protecting the privacy and confidentiality of patient personal information is important to all our therapist and supporting staff.

At Healing Touch, our focus is providing the great medical care to all our patients which includes protecting their personal information. Every member of Healing Touch must follow and understand our commitment to privacy of protecting the personal information.  This policy is reviewed periodically to ensure its compliance to ongoing changes in all our services offering to our clients. 

 

Personal Information and its usage: 

At our clinic(s) we consider following information as personal information:

·         Personal information of our patient: Name, Address, Date of Birth, Phone Number and any other personal characteristics.

·         Personal Health Information such as Health History, Health services provided by us to our patients and its record keeping.

 

We collect personal information from our patient to provide proper care and treatment to them, invoicing them for services which are used at our facility and submitting any supporting claim for reimbursement to third parties such as insurance companies.  Also, we need to ensure that person identification provided to us is true and certified by supporting records by any photo id. 

 

Our business practice is to collect all this information with client’s written or verbal consent, so they are aware that these information are stored for our record keeping.  When patient is unable to provide consent, under age or family member is booking patient’s appointment on behalf of patient; in all these situation we rely on information provided to us and use them as per our business practice.

 

Patient information which are collected at our facility is accessible to all our therapist and staff members, therefore all members of staff are aware of how to keep all these records confidential.  We occasionally have volunteer and seasonal worker to help out in our daily operation; we follow same process with them as our full-time staff to ensure they understand our clinic(s) privacy policy as per this guideline.  We also support our community by hiring co-op or volunteer students; for them we have very strict policy of not using any digital devices during business hours to ensure that all personal data are kept within clinic(s) restricted area. 

 

Storage of Personal Information:

At our clinic(s), we understand importance of protecting personal information and therefore we always take following steps to ensure storage of personal information are safe and safeguarded:

·         All paper information are kept in constant supervision during business hours of staff members.  During off hours all these information are secured locked cabinet or storage.

·         All electronic information are kept in password protected computers and encrypted by software which we use.  We also keep the backup of these data to ensure that we can retrieve these data as up-to-date as possible in case of digital data loss.

·         All paper information for patients who are not actively attending the facility is stored with locked storage and accessible to information officer and custodian of clinic(s)’s data.

·         All our clinics are secure by security surveillance system.

 

We retained all clinical records as per regulatory body of services provided to our clinic.  These regulatory body requires us to retain copy of patients record for 10 years from the later of the following dates:

·         The date of last patient encounter.

·         The date the patient reached or would have reached 18 years of age.

 

Once the data is not needed by our clinic(s), we shred all paper information and delete all digital records.  

 

Accessing and Sharing of Personal Information:

All patient’s data are accessed and shared at our clinic(s) as per following guideline:

·         Patient can request for their information which are stored in our facility with written consent with information of why information is needed.  So we can have awareness of how this information will be used by patient.  We will respond to patient’s request within 30 business days once we get the written consent from patient.

·         Patient treating Therapist at our facility can also request for patient data for auditing purpose.  In order to do this we have established Information Sharing agreement to ensure that therapist follow this strict guideline of patient records once they have possession of this data.

·         Third Party such as another health practitioner or lawyer can also request for patient information as long as we receive the written consent from patient to share this information to third party.  We will provide patient information to third party within 30 business days once we receive the written consent.

·         In some occasion we use patient information for any research study or marketing purpose but this information only be used when we have clear consent from patient.

 

In general, patient can always access this information as long as we have adequate information on how information will be used so we are informed of our records usage.  We may ask for administrative fee to share this information as per FISCO guideline.

 

 

Privacy breaches, information stolen or misplaced Procedure:

We always ensure all personal information for patients are kept in safeguard and tight supervision of our privacy officer.  However in case of privacy breaches, misplaced of records or stolen of records we will follow following procedures:

·         We will inform patient as soon as we become aware of such an event with sincere apology and cooperate with patient for any follow up situation to resolve the matter in timely manner and within our legal boundaries for business.

·         We will inform regulator body and therapist whom need to know about such an event to provide transparency of such an event.

 

If you have any further question about our privacy policy please feel free to contact our Privacy Officer,

Pranit Patel

Unit # 10 – 1801 Harwood Avenue North, Ajax, ON, L1T0K8. 

Phone: 905.239.7022

Email: pranit@healingtouchrehab.com

 

He will attempt to answer any questions or concerns patient might have about this policy. 

 

We always encourage to reach out our privacy office in case patient has any disagreement about our privacy policy.

 

If patient wishes to make a formal complaint about our privacy practices, he or she may make it in writing to our privacy officer.  He will acknowledge receipt of patient complaint, ensure that it is investigated promptly, and that patient is provided with a formal written decision with reasons.

 

If patient has concern about the professionalism of our services or any other matter, we ask patient to kindly bring these concerns to our management so they can address them in timely manner.  However, if we can not satisfy patient concerns, you are entitled to complain to regulatory body.  But its always encouraged to sort out issues in proper communication between patient and management team of Healing Touch.

 

To our best of knowledge this policy is made under Personal Health Information Protection Act (PHIPA).  Clinic management holds all rights to make required changes to privacy policy to ensure that its intake with all legislation changes by PHIPA or Privacy Commissioner of Ontario or Federal Privacy Law.  Moreover, clinic(s) management hold all rights on how to convey these changes to patients so they can decide whom to reach out from our records.

 

For general inquiries, the Information and Privacy Commissioner of Ontario oversees the administration of the privacy legislation.  The commissioner also acts as a kind of ombudsman for privacy disputes.