Office Privacy Statement
Total Focus Kingsway Optometry
Effective January 1, 2012
Introduction
The privacy of our patient’s personal information is an important principle to Total Focus Kingsway Optometry and it’s optometrists. Our optometry clinic is committed to collecting, using and disclosing your personal information in a responsible manner. This document describes our privacy policy.
What is Personal Information
Personal information is information about an individual. It includes information that relates to your personal characteristics (eg. gender, age, income, home address, phone number(s), ethnic background, religion, family status, etc.), or your health (eg. health history, health conditions, health services, etc).
Your business information, when used for business contact purposes (eg. address, phone number, etc.), is not considered personal information and therefore is not affected by privacy legislation.
Collection and Use
- Personal information collected from patients of this practice shall be limited to that required to:
- Evaluate your eye health and vision status
- Determine and recommend appropriate treatment and referral
- Communicate with you about the services we provide
- To advise you about your vision care needs
- Provide you with eye-care, health or other product or treatment information
- Process payment and pursue collection of accounts receivable for services and produced received from our clinic.
- Communicate with others (eg. other health care providers, lawyers, third party insurers, etc.) about your eye health and vision status.
Disclosure
- In the course of providing eye care services to you, your personal information may be disclosed where required or allowed by law and may also be disclosed to:
- Other health care providers
- Insurers or other third party payers you have identified
- Regulatory authorities, where such information may assist in the investigation of a complaint or a review of standards of care
- Governmental authorities (eg. CCRA, Privacy Commissioner, Human Rights Commission, etc.) who have it in their mandate to access your file
- Our practice’s lawyers, accountants, information managers or other consultants contracted to provide advice or counsel regarding the administration or management of the practice.
- On termination of sale of the practice, to a purchasing optometrist or file storage facility that agrees to serve as trustee of your personal information and to only access this information for the purpose of confirming their custody of your file, unless you initiate contact as a patient
The disclosure of personal information shall be limited to that which is necessary for the purpose for which it is disclosed. All the above noted external parties have the same legal responsibility as this optometry practice to protect all personal information collected in the course of their activities.
Access and Destruction of Personal Information
You have the right to access your personal information as any reasonable time (eg. during regular office hours) and have the right to request corrections to your personal information. This applies to factual information and not professional opinions we may have recorded. Corrections are recorded on your patient file. If our office does not agree with the corrections, we will include a brief statement on your file recording both opinions.
Reasonable safeguards will be taken whenever paper and electronic records are destroyed or deleted. Every reasonable effort will be made to ensure that no record remains after destruction.
Do you have a Question?
Our Privacy Officer is Dr. Ross McKenzie.
Should you have any questions or concerns about our privacy policy, please contact our privacy officer at:
646A Kingsway Mall
Edmonton, Alberta T5G 3A6
PH: 780.474.6377
FAX: 780.474.2578
More general inquiries should be directed to:
The Alberta Government Privacy Help Desk – privacyhelpdesk@gov.ab.ca