NOTICE OF PRIVACY PRACTICES FOR PROTECTED HEALTH INFORMATION

"This Notice describes how medical information about you may be used and disclosed and how you may 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 to carry out TREATMENT, PAYMENT or HEALTH CARE OPERATIONS 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. We are required to abide by the terms of this Notice of Privacy Practices. We may change the terms of our notice, at any time. The new notice will be effective for all protected health information that we maintain at that time. Upon your request, we will provide you with any revised Notice of Privacy Practices by calling the office and requesting that a revised copy be sent to you in the mail or asking for one at the time of your next appointment.

Typical Uses and Disclosures of Medical Information: We collect medical information from you. Within our office, we restrict the disclosure of this information to doctors, nurses, technicians and insurance and billing personnel. Outside our office, we restrict the disclosure to those people, entities and agencies for whom you authorize disclosure such as other healthcare providers (doctors, nurses, extended care facilities), insurance companies, billing agencies, hospitals and surgery sites, or those agencies and entities for whom legal and administrative requirements demand disclosure such as:

• When required by law
• Public health activities (deaths, child abuse, neglect, domestic violence, problems with products, reactions to medications, product recalls, disease/infection exposure, disease/injury/disability control/prevention)
• Health oversight activities (audits, investigations, inspections)
• Judicial and administrative proceedings (court order)
• Appropriate law enforcement requests (to identify or locate a suspect, fugitive, material witness, or missing person)
• Deceased person information to coroners, medical examiners, funeral directors
• Organ and tissue donation
• Research, provided authorization is IRB-approved or privacy board-approved
• Emergencies or to avert serious threat to health or safety
• Specialized government functions (military, inmate)
• Worker’s Compensation
• For the Defense of Medical Professional Liability claims.

PATIENT PRIVACY RIGHTS

You Have The Right To:

• Inspect and copy medical information from your chart. You may submit a written request to our office and pay the copy fee and receive a copy of your record. We must respond within 30 days if the record is readily available and within 60 days if it is not readily available.
  
• Amend medical information in your chart. You may identify inaccurate or incomplete information in your chart. You can do this with a written request to amend your chart directed to our office. We must respond within 60 days.
  
• Receive an accounting of any disclosures made from your record over the last six years, starting April 14, 2003. You can get this with a written request directed to our office. We must respond within 60 days.
  
• Request restrictions as the amount of medical information we disclose. This is limited as noted above, and your request may not supercede the typical disclosures noted above. You may revoke or restrict consent. We are not required to agree to a requested restriction.
  
• Request confidential communications. All communications in our office are confidential. You may specifically request that all communications be confidential with a written request directed to our office.

Patient's Bill of Rights and Responsibilities

Policy Statement:

It is the policy of the Suncoast Eye Center to protect the rights of patients and to inform them of their rights, as well as responsibilities. This policy is adapted from the 1998 Patients Bill of Rights Act.

Our Responsibilities Under HIPPA:

We are required by Law to maintain the privacy of your personal health information, and to provide you notice of our legal duties and privacy practices and adhere to this notice. We are required to abide by the terms of the notice currently in effect. We reserve the right to make changes to this notice. We will post a notice that the notice has been changed and the effective date of the change, copies will be made available upon request.

Complaints You may complain to us or to the Secretary of Health and Human Services if you believe your privacy rights have been violated by us. You may file a complaint with us by notifying our privacy contact of your complaint. We will not retaliate against you for filing a complaint.

Suncoast Eye Center is committed to safeguarding your privacy as you use this website or order products.

All information collected through this site will be kept confidential. It will not be sold, rented, traded, loaned, or otherwise disclosed to any other party unless we receive your explicit consent.

The Site contains links to other sites at which personal information may be collected. In such instances, unless expressly provided to the contrary, the collection and use of your personal information will be governed by the privacy policy applicable to that site. That privacy policy should identify the entity that is collecting your personal information.

Any personal information you provide will be used only in ways that you have consented to. If you contact us to place an order, we will use your information to fulfill your order and contact you about the order. This information may be shared with third parties, but only for purposes of order fulfillment, such as credit card processing or shipping information.

When ordering products or services on the Site, you may be asked to provide a credit card number. Depending upon the activity, some of the information that we ask you to provide is identified as mandatory and some as voluntary. If you do not provide the mandatory data with respect to a particular activity, you will not be able to engage in that activity.

We may use your personal information to contact you for promotional purposes, such as with informational e-mail messages. In any such case, we will provide a clear means for you to remove yourself from future mailings. Information that is not personally identifiable may be collected and stored for site statistics and research to make our website more usable. This may include information such as site visitors' browser and operating system, IP address, domain and host names, and date and time of access. This information is not shared with any third parties except in the preparation of statistical or research reports from our logs.

Site Security

Online purchases will be redirected to a secure server before your credit card information is entered, and transmitted to our secure payment gateway. We maintain our website and associated data with technical, physical, and administrative safeguards to protect against loss of data or unauthorized access to or use of data. However, as with any Internet technology, no data can be guaranteed to be 100% secure.

Use of cookies

When you visit this Site, you can browse the Site and access important information without revealing your identity. In order to improve our Site, we use "cookies" to track your visit. A cookie is a small amount of data that is transferred to your browser by a Web server and can only be read by the server that gave it to you. Most browsers are initially set to accept cookies. You can set your browser to notify you when you receive a cookie, giving you the chance to decide whether to accept it. (For some Web pages that require an authorization, cookies are ot optional. Users choosing not to accept cookies will probably not be able to access those pages.) While Suncoast Eye Center may use cookies to track your visit to Suncoast Eye Center, and our Web servers automatically log the IP/Internet address of your computer, Suncoast Eye Center, does not use this information to identify you personally.