Privacy Policy
1. Purpose
The purpose of this policy is to communicate clearly the Personal Information handling practices of Anaesthetic Care, in accordance with relevant legislation.
The term “Personal Information” as used in this Policy, refers to any information that can be used to identify a specific person. It does not include information that has been aggregated or made anonymous such that it can no longer be reasonably associated with a specific person.
2. Introduction
Anaesthetic Care is committed to ensuring the privacy of individuals in accordance with the Australian Privacy Principles – Privacy Act 1988.
This Privacy Policy will help you understand what Personal Information Anaesthetic Care collects, holds, uses and discloses, and the purposes of such collection and disclosure.
3. Collection and use of your Personal Information
Broadly speaking, we collect information in two ways: (1) when you provide it directly to us, and (2) passively through technology such as “cookies”. The types of Personal Information that we collect and our use of that information will depend on whether you are the patient or the anaesthetist.
(1) Information You Provide
Patient
Anaesthetic Care provides an online solution for the mandatory pre-operative patient assessment required by anaesthetists, as well an online fee request form and message form. We collect information such as, but is not limited to, your name, phone number, date of birth, email address, weight, height, surgical procedure details (planned and past), health fund membership details, and other medical and lifestyle related information. The answers you submit online are directly sent to your anaesthetist via their unique doctor ID code, who will then use the information to best plan for your anaesthesia needs. We respect your full privacy and will treat your Personal Information as strictly private and confidential and will only be disclosed to your anaesthetist.
Anaesthetic Care also provides an online payment solution using Stripe’s payment gateway to enable patients to pay their anaesthetist’s fees. When you use this service, we collect personal information such as your name, email address and your payment card information on behalf of Stripe to process your payment. Your name and email address, and not your payment card information, will be forwarded to your anaesthetist to notify them of your payment. Once payment has been made, we do not retain any of the Personal Information that you had provided us to pay for your fees.
Stripe retains your Personal and payment card information for processing purposes and all of your Personal Information is also protected by Stripe’s Privacy Policy. Stripe is certified to Payment Card Industry (PCI) Service Provider Level 1, the most stringent level of certification for the handling of information related to credit cards.
Anaesthetist
Anaesthetic Care requires anaesthetists to join and become members in order to receive submissions from their patients. As part of the membership registration, we may collect information such as, but is not limited to, your name, email address, and information about your practice.
Anaesthetic Care also offers your patients to view your profile. You may provide information related to your name, qualifications, experience and training, and other general information, and these will be shared with your patients when they view your public profile.
When you register to accept payments from patients using Stripe, Stripe collects Personal Information from you to enable Stripe to provide their services. This Personal Information includes, but is not limited to, your name, your email address, location, date of birth, and bank account details.
Stripe retains your Personal Information for processing purposes and all of your Personal Information is also protected by Stripe’s Privacy Policy. Stripe is certified to Payment Card Industry (PCI) Service Provider Level 1, the most stringent level of certification for the handling of information related to credit cards.
(2) Cookies and Web Server Logs
We utilise “cookies” and other technologies to collect non-personally-identifiable information from our website. Information gathered through cookies and web-server log files may include information such as the date and time of visits, the pages viewed, IP addresses, links to/from any page, and time spent at our site.
We use cookie data to measure web traffic and usage activity on our website for purposes of monitoring, troubleshooting and improving our website and services, to look for possible fraudulent activity, and to better understand the sources of traffic and transactions on our website. Cookies also allow our servers to remember your account information for future visits.
4. Disclosure of your Personal Information
Anaesthetic Care only uses the Personal Information for the purpose for which it was collected and does not sell or rent your Personal Information to marketers or other third parties.
We may at times require and engage third parties to carry out certain business functions such as, but not limited to, IT, system maintenance, accounting, taxation and legal advices. In such situations, we will ensure confidentiality agreements are in place to protect your Personal Information, and ensure your Personal Information is not used for any other purpose except for the purposes outlined in the terms of engagement made with the contracted third party.
Stripe may disclose Personal Information it collects about you to third parties for a variety of purposes in connection with providing its Services.
5. Retention of your Personal Information
For Personal Information contained in the submissions, we retain your information on our servers for further reviewing by your anaesthetist and will not retain the Personal Information of any person for longer than 1 month after the date of your operation at which point the submissions are automatically and permanently deleted.
Stripe has a variety of obligations to retain the data that we provide them, both to ensure that transactions can be appropriately processed, settled, refunded or chargedback, to identify fraud, and also to comply with laws applicable to Stripe and to their banking providers and credit card processors. For anaesthetists, even if you close your Stripe account, Stripe will retain certain information as necessary to meet their obligations. However, Stripe will identify your account in their database as “inactive” or “closed”.
6. Protection of your Personal Information
Anaesthetic Care undertakes to protect Personal Information from unauthorised use, access, disclosure and alteration.
Although no data transmission can be guaranteed to be 100% secure, we take reasonable steps to ensure that your Personal Information is accurate, complete, up-to-date, relevant and stored securely. We also take all reasonable steps to ensure that the Personal Information we hold is protected from misuse, interference, loss, unauthorised access, modification or disclosure by the use of various methods including access limitation, and Secure Socket Layer (SSL) encryption technology to safeguard your Personal Information.
7. Changes to this Policy
We reserve the right to make changes to this Policy from time to time. Please review this Policy periodically to check for updates to ensure you are comfortable with any changes. Formal notice of amendments will not be given.
8. Contact us – Access, Correction and Complaints
You may request access to all your Personal Information that we collect online. However, there will be a small administrative fee for the retrieval of the data.
For anaesthetists, you can update your account information by signing on to our website.
If you would like to access or seek correction of your Personal Information, or if you have complaints regarding our privacy practices, please contact our privacy officer by emailing privacy@anaesthetic.care. We aim to acknowledge receipt of all complaints within 5 business days, and resolve all complaints within 45 days.