Physicians Eye Center

Physicians Eye Center has always been committed to protecting the privacy of your health information. We now are required by law to confirm this commitment to you in writing by furnishing you with this Notice of Privacy Practices. The Notice describes our legal duties and our practices relating to the privacy of any medical or other personal information about you in our records. We must follow the procedures described in this Notice of Privacy Practices as long as the Notice remains in effect. We reserve the right to change our privacy practices at any time and, if we made changes, we will apply our new privacy practices to all the information we collected in our records about you prior to the change and to any new information that we get after the change. If we make significant changes to our privacy practices, we will revise our Notice of Privacy Practices to reflect the changes. We will always have a copy of our current Notice of Privacy Practices posted in our office and on our website. In addition, you may get a paper copy of our current Notice of Privacy Practices at any time by contacting our Privacy Officer at (603) 668-3772 or 407 Riverway Place Bedford, NH 03110 or by asking the staff at our registration desk. Our Privacy Officer and our registration staff also can answer any questions you may have about this Notice. WHAT INFORMATION DO WE HAVE ABOUT YOU? When you come to Physicians Eye Center for care, we will ask for personal information such as: Your name, address, and phone number Information about your medical history Information about your health insurance Information about other doctors or healthcare providers that you have in the past or are seeing now Your Social Security number (for identification purposes) Your marital status Your occupation and employer We also gather medical information about you when we examine you and from tests that we run or have other healthcare providers run on you. We may get information about you from others that are part of your ?circle of care,? such as your referring physician, other healthcare providers that have seen you, healthcare facilities that have run tests on you, your health insurance plan, and, sometimes, even family members or close friends that help take care of you. We always create a record of the information we collect, the health findings we make and the care we provide to you. We also have records of the bills that we send you and your insurer for your care. HOW DO WE USE OR DISCLOSE THE INFORMATION WE HAVE ABOUT YOU? Physicians Eye Center uses and discloses health information about our patients for a variety of purposes. We regularly attempt to limit all uses and disclosures of your health information to the minimum amount of information necessary to accomplish the task at hand. However, to be sure that you receive the best care possible, we will release your entire medical record when it is needed by other healthcare providers who are treating you. This Notice of Privacy Practices identifies all of the types of uses and disclosures of individually identifiable health information that Physicians Eye Center is permitted to make without obtaining a written authorization from you. We have not described every kind of use or disclosure within each category. Rather, we have only provided typical examples. Although we do not expect to use or disclose every patient?s health information for each of the purposes described, all of the types of uses and disclosures that we can make without your written authorization are described below so you can understand how your information may be handled. Required Disclosures: We are required by law to release health information to the Secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, upon request, if the government needs to check on our compliance with the federal laws governing the privacy of patient information. We also are required by law to allow you to see and copy your records under most circumstance. Your right to see your records is described in more detail below. Uses and Disclosures For Treatment: We will use and disclose your health information to treat you. For example, we typically consider your medical history, your symptoms, and our examination findings when we determine what is wrong with you and write prescription for medicines that you may need. To help us figure out what is wrong with you, we may have to give health information about you to or get health information about you from other healthcare organizations that perform tests on you. On occasion, we also may look at information in medical records about you that we get from specialists or general practitioners who have been involved in treating you in the past to help us develop an appropriate plan for taking care of you now. If you do not specifically object (by notifying us of your objection in writing at 407 Riverway Place Bedford, NH 03110) we may use your health information to send you postal card appointment reminders or notices about the need to schedule a new appointment or to phone you at your home or office to remind you. In addition, we may use your personal information to contact you to discuss test results or your condition or to inform you about various health services available from us or to recommend other possible treatment options, alternatives or health-related services that may be of interest to you. Uses and Disclosures For Payment: We will use and disclose information about you to bill for our services and to collect payment from you or your insurance company. For example, we must tell your insurance company what we did for you to get paid properly for the services we provided. Sometimes, insurance companies make us tell them your diagnosis or give them other health information about you to help them decide how much to pay us. We also may have to tell the insurance company about any surgery that you may need to get prior approval or to determine whether the insurance company will cover the procedure. Uses and Disclosures For Healthcare Operations: We will use health information about you for the general operation of our business. For example, we may use our patients? health information to evaluate and improve the quality of the health services we provide. We also sometimes arrange for auditors or other consultants to review our practices and look at our operations so that they can help us figure out how to improve our services.