Medem Privacy and Confidentiality Policy

Updated April 2005

Our Philosophy
Changes to Policy
Contacting Us
Site Ownership, Scope, and Applicability of the Policy
Activity Tracking
Collection and Stewardship of Other Information
Third Parties
Use of Cookies
Protecting Children
Legal Requests
Legal Disclaimer

Our Philosophy. Your trust is our greatest asset. We make every reasonable effort to ensure that information held by Medem-powered Web sites is confidential and secure. We disclose our information-security practices to you as clearly and fully as possible. These practices receive continuous oversight, and many of our business decisions, including Web design, technology selections, and third-party business relationships, begin and end with considerations for your privacy.

Changes to Policy. While our philosophy will not change, the details of the policy will change over time as we add additional services and form relationships with new business partners. Please refer back to this page periodically. The date the policy was last revised will always appear at the top of the policy pages.

Contacting Us. If you have any questions about this Privacy and Confidentiality Policy, the practices of Medem-powered Web sites, your dealings with Medem, or would like to provide comments, please contact us at info@medem.com, or by phone, toll-free, at 1.877.926.3336 within the United States.

Site Ownership, Scope, and Applicability of The Policy. This Policy applies only when you are within the Medem-powered environment and only to information that Medem collects. (Click here for more details on the scope of this policy.) Please be advised that individual medical practices with Medem-powered Web sites are the legal owners of those Medem-powered sites and can customize their sites in two ways that fall outside the scope of the Medem Privacy and Confidentiality Policy:

A medical practice could put a link on its site that takes you to a site or service that is not part of the Medem-powered environment. Once there, you will no longer be interacting with a Medem server, and you should no longer see any Medem trademarks or legends that refer to Medem. If you leave the Medem-powered environment in this way, you can no longer be assured that the operator of the other site or service will follow the privacy policies and information security practices that are described in the Medem policy. We generally strive to provide buffer pages to inform you when you are leaving our environment, but we cannot monitor all site customizations made by individual medical practices.
Within borders bearing a Medem trademark, a practice might publish online forms that ask you to provide information, which is then sent directly to the practice via e-mail (instead of sending it to a database on a Medem server). The most common example would be a practice conducting an online survey or questionnaire among visitors to its site. Medem has no control over information collected in this manner and we cannot be responsible for the security or privacy of that information.

If you ever have reason to believe that a medical practice has used its Medem-powered Web site to obtain information that it has used inappropriately, please contact us at info@medem.com.

Activity Tracking. We collect and use activity statistics so we can understand the ways in which our sites and services are being utilized. We also provide this data, stripped of all personal identifiers, to the individual medical practices and physicians that publish Medem-powered Web sites. Activity related data is stored anonymously and it is only used in the form of aggregated statistics. This aggregated, anonymous data may also be shared with business partners. Activity related data cannot be used to target you with solicitations of any kind.

With the exception of your User ID and Secure Messages, you have full, online access to any and all information that you provide to us for purposes of viewing and changing it.

Collection and Stewardship of Other Information. We only collect information that is required in order to provide you with services. We design our sites so that you must make express, informed choices to use services that ask for personal information and authorize us to have access to your personal information. If you do choose to provide us with personal information, we will hold that information in the strictest confidence taking all reasonable steps to protect your personal health information.

At any time, you can opt out of any service you have been using and revoke your authorization for our access to your information. We monitor and adopt best practices from industry guidelines and applicable statutes, and we follow appropriate information security practices.

Third Parties. We work with business partners to provide the highest-quality service available. Our business partner contracts include protective language regarding consumer privacy in those cases where we feel the nature of the partner's role demands it. We do not disclose personal information to any third party without clearly noting the purpose of such disclosure at the point where you choose to use the service and obtain your authorization.

Use of Cookies. We use non-persistent session state cookies to establish and sustain login sessions. These cookies disappear after you close your browser. The cookies are used to monitor your session and to automatically log you out of our service if you exceed 60 minutes of inactivity. Other sites cannot use cookies created by our sites, and we do not use cookies to track your activities outside of our own sites.

A cookie is a small text file that Web sites use to recognize a user. At its simplest, cookie technology works by carrying a unique ID generated by the server that creates the cookie. A cookie does not pose a threat to the computer that accepts it.

Protecting Children. None of our sites or services are directed at children, and we make every reasonable effort to ensure that we do not accept personal information from persons under 13 years of age.

Legal Requests. Medem cooperates with law enforcement inquiries as a matter of policy. We will use IP addresses and other available information to attempt to identify a user when we are legally compelled to do so or when we feel it is necessary to protect our services, sites, customers, or others.

Legal Disclaimer. Unfortunately, no data protection method or combination of methods can be guaranteed 100 percent secure. We take all reasonable steps to protect your personal information as described throughout this policy, but we cannot ensure or warrant our ability to do so. As a result, you use Medem content, products, and services at your own risk. Medem will not be liable for disclosures of your personal information due to errors in transmission or unauthorized acts of third parties.