PRIVACY

PATIENT PRIVACY POLICY

Orthodontists have been and continue to be bound by professional standards of confidentiality that are even more stringent than those required by law.  Therefore, we have always protected your right to privacy.

Like all health care providers, some orthodontists are now required* by law to inform their patients, upon request, of their policies regarding privacy of patient information.  This is due to the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996, whose privacy provisions became effective in April, 2003.

Types of information we collect: Health history, dental history, dental and orthodontic records obtained from you or generated within this office. Your health information is located in three places in our office: On your treatment record, in your folder, in your model box.  The “privacy officer” in this office is Dr. Lang.

Parties to whom we disclose information: Our employees, as required, for performance of their duties.  Other health professionals, such as your general dentist, as required to provide service to you.  Your insurance company, as required, for processing claims.  Under the new law, you have the right to:

• obtain access to your protected health information
• receive a written explanation about information handling
• inspect and copy your health records
• request inaccurate information be corrected or amended
• know when your information is used other than above
• request restrictions on disclosure
• opt out of marketing uses of your health information
• complain about violations of privacy

Even before the law, this office has never used your health information for marketing and has never withheld patient records when requested.  It seems the law was written to curtail abuses which may exist elsewhere in the healthcare and insurance industries.

*Under the law, the above regulations do not apply to this office because we do not transmit protected health information electronically.  However we have been and will continue to be interested in protecting your privacy, so we will continue to monitor changes in the law and keep you informed.

                        – download a printable version of out patient privacy policy here .

WEBSITE PRIVACY POLICY

This website, as with most legitimate business websites, respects your privacy. It's just good business to do so.

When you visit any website, including this one, the server where the website is stored needs to know where to send the content you want to view. When you click on a link to any website or page, your computer sends out information. This information includes your web address and computer location, the date and time of your visit, your operating system (Windows, Mac, etc.), your browser (Netscape, Internet Explorer, etc.) your screen resolution, and other such things. This is how the the server knows where to deliver the content, and is sent automatically by your computer.

Computers are different from televisions in this way. For TV, all channels are being sent to all televisions all the time and you select the one you want. For computers, your computer sends a request to the computer where the page is stored. That computer answers the request by sending the page back to you. It needs to know specifically where to send the page. It sends it only to your computer. The other stuff about screen resolution and browser type is in case the website has different versions of the page like for handheld devices, etc. This all happens in an instant. When the remote server receives the request, it sends the web page back to you and only you, at your internet address.

We also uses a hit counter. We use StatCounter to organize the above information to help us decide the best way to design our web pages. In addition to the content you are viewing, the StatCounter code sends your browser a temporary text file called a cookie. This cookie tells us which pages you viewed and in what order, which pages are popular and which are not. We can not and do not use this cookie to collect personal information about you. We would not even if we could. This cookie allows us to know information like "a visitor connected to the site using sbc yahoo dsl which has a server in San Francisco and viewed our faq page for 15 minutes then went to our privacy page for five minutes". If you don't want websites to know information like that, turn off cookies on your browser.

The long and short is, we can never know anything personal about you which you do not tell us. The only way we can get your name, email address, or other personal information, is if you send it to us in an email. If you ever do that, we will not share, give, sell, or offer your email address to anyone else. We do not maintain an email mailing list, nor do we broadcast information to those who have sent us email. We dislike spam as much as anyone, and work to prevent it. We are also serious about data security, to the point of setting up physical, electronic, and procedural safeguards to secure any information you may send us.