THIS NOTICE DESCRIBES HOW YOUR MEDICAL INFORMATION MAY BE USED AND DISCLOSED, AND HOW YOU CAN GET ACCESS TO THIS INFORMATION. PLEASE REVIEW THIS NOTICE CAREFULLY.
New Age Aesthetics and Wellness understands and agrees that patient confidentiality can be an integral part of patient care. Under the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (commonly, HIPAA), all health care providers must maintain as confidential your protected health information, or PHI. Your PHI can include your name, address, social security number, email address, telephone number, date of birth, driver's license number, and medical record number. Health care providers must also provide patients with notice of the legal duties incumbent upon health care providers and their privacy practices so that the health care providers avoid any accidental or inappropriate disclosure of your PHI.
In February 2009, The American Recovery Reinvestment Act (ARRA or more commonly, the "Stimulus Bill") made some significant modifications to the HIPAA Privacy and Security Rules dealing primarily with the protection of your PHI in all media (meaning paper files and electronic storage). In addition, the Stimulus Bill introduced some new terminology - "Personally Identifiable Information" or "PII" along with penalties and mitigation associated with any violations and/or breaches of PHI or PII.
Personally Identifiable Information (again, the PII) is defined as any patient's first name or first initial and the last name in combination with any one or more of the following data elements belonging to that patient: social security number, driver's license number or ID card number, account number, or credit/debit card number in combination with any required security code or access code or password that would permit access to the patient's financial account.
New Age Aesthetics and Wellness uses health information about you for treatment purposes, to obtain payment for treatment it has provided to you, for internal administrative purposes, and to evaluate the quality of care you receive. In addition, as part of your ongoing treatment, health information may be shared with other health care providers (for example, certain medical specialists) to whom you are referred to or from whom you were referred to New Age Aesthetics and Wellness. Such information may be shared by paper mail, electronic mail, facsimile, or other methods.
Further, New Age Aesthetics and Wellness may disclose your PII (in whole or in part) without your authorization under certain circumstances. For example, subject to specific requirements, we may disclose your PII without your authorization for public health purposes such as reporting communicable diseases, birth, death, injury, or child abuse or neglect; for auditing purposes; for research studies; for worker's compensation claims; and for emergencies. We will also provide information when required to do so by law enforcement authorities or by court authorities. Contact with you may also take place in the form of an appointment reminder, prescription refills, test results, etc.
When other situations arise, we will ask you for your written authorization before using or disclosing any of your Pll. If you choose to sign an authorization to disclose some or all of your PII, you may later request to revoke either all or part of the authorization.
As the patient, you have the right to see and receive a copy of all information that is contained in your medical record (chart) at this office, with the following exceptions: psychotherapy notes; information compiled in reasonable anticipation of civil, criminal, or administrative litigation or enforcement proceedings; and protected health information if it is subject to protection under other applicable law. If New Age Aesthetics and Wellness denies your right of access, you are entitled to have that determination reviewed if the reason for the denial was one of the following: a health care professional has determined that access to the information is reasonably likely to endanger the life or safety of you or another person; or the protected health information refers to another person and access to the information is reasonably likely to cause harm to that person. If New Age Aesthetics and Wellness denies your right of access, you will not be entitled to have that determination reviewed if the reason for the denial was one of the following: the protected health information is excepted from the right of access under applicable law; or the protected health information was obtained from someone other than the health care provider under a promise of confidentiality.