This Notice of Privacy Practices describes how Davis Naturopathic Medicine, Inc. (“Davis Naturopathic Medicine,” “we,” “our,” or “us”) may use and disclose your protected health information (PHI) to carry out treatment, payment or health care operations and for other purposes that are permitted or required by law. It also describes your rights to access and control your PHI. “PHI”, as defined by the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (“HIPAA”), is information about you, including demographic information, that may identify you and that relates to your past, present or future physical or mental health or condition and related health care services.
Davis Naturopathic Medicine, Inc. is required to abide by HIPAA, other relevant federal and state laws and by the terms of this Notice of Privacy Practices. We may change the terms of this Notice at any time to comply with changes in the law. The new notice will be effective for all PHI that we maintain at that time and that we receive in the future. Upon your request, we will provide you with any revised Notice of Privacy Practices.
1) Uses and Disclosures We will use your PHI for the purposes of treatment and health care operations.
Treatment includes the disclosure of health information to other providers who have referred you for services or are involved in your care. This may include physicians, nurses, therapists and health providers. For example, we may feel that a stroke patient we are treating would benefit from an evaluation by a speech-language pathologist to address a swallowing difficulty. The health information we share with the speech-language pathologist would be considered a treatment-related disclosure.
Health Care Operations includes the utilization of your health care information in connection with our health care operations to run our business appropriately.
Appointment Reminders, Treatment Alternatives and Health Related Benefits and Services. We may use and disclose PHI to contact you and to remind you that you have an appointment with us. We also may use and disclose PHI to tell you about treatment alternatives or health-related services that may be of interest to you.
Other Permitted or Required Disclosures:
- As Required by Law
- Public Health Activities
- Government agencies about Abuse, Neglect or Domestic Violence
- Government Health Oversight agencies
- Judicial and Administrative Proceedings
- Workers’ Compensation
- Law Enforcement under limited circumstances
- Special Government Functions for national security as required
- To Avert a Serious Threat to Health or Safety
- Business Associates:We contract with outside companies that provide services for and to us, such as management consultants, accountants or attorneys and maintain a list of these business associates. In certain circumstances, we may need to share your PHI with a business associate so it can perform a service on our behalf. We will limit the disclosure of your information to a business associate to the amount of information that is the minimum necessary to perform services for us. In addition, we will have a written contract in place with the business associate requiring it to protect the privacy of your PHI as described in this Notice of Privacy Practices and as required by law.
Other Uses or Disclosures With an Authorization: Your authorization is required before your PHI may be used or disclosed by us for other purposes. In addition to the above uses of your healthcare information, you may give us written authorization to release your healthcare information to anyone at any time. You may also revoke such authorization, in writing, at any time. Revocation of such authorization would not affect any information that was released while that authorization was in effect. Written authorization is required to release your healthcare information to family and friends, persons involved in your care, marketing and fundraising.
2) Your Privacy Rights
Restrictions: You have the right to request additional restrictions on how your PHI is used, however, we are not required to agree with your request. If we do agree, we must abide by your request.
Confidential Communications: You have the right to request confidential communication from us at a location of your choosing. This request must be in writing.
Access to PHI: You have the right to request a copy of your medical record. You must make this request in writing. If any of your PHI is contained in an electronic health record, we are required to provide you with a copy of your information in electronic format, upon request.
Amendments: You have the right to request an amendment be made to your PHI, if you disagree with what it says about you. This request must be made in writing. If we disagree with you, we are not required to make the change. You do have the right to submit a written statement about why you disagree that will become part of your record. We may not amend parts of your medical record that we did not create. All requests for an amendment must be approved by the treating doctor and will be clearly marked in the file as a patient requested amendment.
Accounting of Disclosures: You have the right to request a list of all instances of disclosures of your records made in the previous six years. These disclosures will not include those made for treatment, payment, or health care operations or for which we have obtained authorization.
Complaints: If you feel that your privacy rights have been violated, you have the right to make a complaint to us in writing without fear of retaliation. Your complaint should contain enough specific information so that we may adequately investigate and respond to your concerns. If you are not satisfied with our response, you may complain directly to the Secretary of Health and Human Services.
Our Duty to Protect Your Privacy: We are required to comply with the federal health information privacy regulations by maintaining the privacy of your PHI. These rules require us to provide you with this document, our Notice of Privacy Practices. We reserve the right to update this notice if required by law. If we do update this notice at any time in the future, you will receive a revised notice when you next seek treatment from us.
Breach Notification: We must report to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (“HHS”) breaches of “unsecured PHI,” defined as PHI that is not secured through the use of a technology or methodology specified by HHS. To comply with this requirement, we have created and implemented policies and procedures for identifying, tracking and reporting breaches of “unsecured PHI.” If we discover that a breach of your unsecured PHI has occurred, we are obligated to notify you within 60 days of that breach. The notification will include: (A) A brief description of what happened, including the date of the breach and the date of the discovery of the breach, if known; (B) A description of the types of unsecured PHI that were involved in the breach (such as whether full name, social security number, date of birth, home address, account number, diagnosis, disability code, or other types of information were involved); (C) Any steps you should take to protect yourself from potential harm resulting from the breach; (D) A brief description of what we are doing to investigate the breach, to mitigate harm, and to protect against any further breaches; and (E) Contact procedures for you to ask questions or learn additional information, which shall include a toll-free telephone number, an e-mail address, Web site, or postal address.
Privacy Contact: If you would like more information about our privacy practices or to file a complaint you may contact: Kathleen Fromuth, Privacy Officer; Davis Naturopathic Medicine, Inc.; 621 4th St., Suite 6, Davis, CA 95616; (530) 848-6364
Who we are
Our website address is: https://www.davisnaturalmedicine.com.
Disclaimer
The information on www.davisnaturalmedicine.com that Dr. Fromuth is sharing is for general information and educational purposes only. While Dr. Fromuth is a naturopathic doctor, the information on this website is not medical advice – it is not to be used for diagnosis or treatment. Anything that you do, you do at your own risk. Please do not rely on any information here as medical advice or treatment. You always need to speak with your own licensed healthcare provider about any changes to diet, supplements, medication, etc. If you would like Dr. Fromuth to be a part of your healthcare team, call (530) 848-6364 to see if she’d be a good fit for you.
Terms & Conditions
Everything on www.davisnaturalmedicine.com is Dr. Fromuth’s intellectual property and copyrighted work. You are able to download and review this information for your own personal non-commercial use.
What personal data we collect and why we collect it
Comments
When visitors leave comments on the site we collect the data shown in the comments form, and also the visitor’s IP address and browser user agent string to help spam detection.
An anonymized string created from your email address (also called a hash) may be provided to the Gravatar service to see if you are using it. The Gravatar service privacy policy is available here: https://automattic.com/privacy/. After approval of your comment, your profile picture is visible to the public in the context of your comment.
Media
If you upload images to the website, you should avoid uploading images with embedded location data (EXIF GPS) included. Visitors to the website can download and extract any location data from images on the website.
Contact forms
Information entered into contact forms is sent to Dr. Fromuth and only viewed by her.
Cookies
If you leave a comment on our site you may opt-in to saving your name, email address and website in cookies. These are for your convenience so that you do not have to fill in your details again when you leave another comment. These cookies will last for one year.
If you visit our login page, we will set a temporary cookie to determine if your browser accepts cookies. This cookie contains no personal data and is discarded when you close your browser.
When you log in, we will also set up several cookies to save your login information and your screen display choices. Login cookies last for two days, and screen options cookies last for a year. If you select “Remember Me”, your login will persist for two weeks. If you log out of your account, the login cookies will be removed.
If you edit or publish an article, an additional cookie will be saved in your browser. This cookie includes no personal data and simply indicates the post ID of the article you just edited. It expires after 1 day.
Embedded content from other websites
Articles on this site may include embedded content (e.g. videos, images, articles, etc.). Embedded content from other websites behaves in the exact same way as if the visitor has visited the other website.
These websites may collect data about you, use cookies, embed additional third-party tracking, and monitor your interaction with that embedded content, including tracking your interaction with the embedded content if you have an account and are logged in to that website.
Analytics
Who we share your data with
Voluntary personal data is collected by Caldera Forms and HIPAA Forms and is sent to Dr. Fromuth’s WordPress account.
How long we retain your data
If you leave a comment, the comment and its metadata are retained indefinitely. This is so we can recognize and approve any follow-up comments automatically instead of holding them in a moderation queue.
For users that register on our website (if any), we also store the personal information they provide in their user profile. All users can see, edit, or delete their personal information at any time (except they cannot change their username). Website administrators can also see and edit that information.
What rights you have over your data
If you have an account on this site, have left comments, signed up for the newsletter mailing list, or submitted a contact form or “apply to be a patient” form, you can request to receive an exported file of the personal data we hold about you, including any data you have provided to us. You can also request that we erase any personal data we hold about you. This does not include any data we are obliged to keep for administrative, legal, or security purposes.
Where we send your data
Visitor comments may be checked through an automated spam detection service.
Your contact information
You may call 530-848-6364 at any time if you’d like to remove voluntary shared information, including your name and email address, from our database.