PRIVACY POLICY
This privacy policy provides information to you, our patient, on how your personal information is collected and used within our practice, and the circumstances in which we may share it with third parties.
What kinds of personal information do we collect?
• Your name, address, date of birth, email address, and contact details
• Medicare number and other government identifiers
• Other health information about you, including: notes regarding you diagnoses; your specialist reports and test results; your appointment and billing details; your prescriptions; your dental records; your genetic information.
How do we collect and hold personal information?
• From you or the person responsible for you directly when you provide your details to us. This may occur via a face-to-face discussion, telephone conversation, telehealth, registration forms. To support clinical documentation, this information may also be collected or processed with the assistance of AI-enabled clinical note-taking or transcription tools.
• From third parties where the Privacy Act or other law allows it. This may include (but is not limited to): other members of your treating team, diagnostic centres, specialists, hospitals, the My Health Record system, electronic prescription services, Medicare, your health insurer, and the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme.
Why do we collect, hold, use and disclose personal information?
• To provide health services to you
• To comply with our legal obligations, including (but not limited to) mandatory notification of communicable diseases or mandatory reporting under applicable child protection legislation
• To help us manage our accounts and administrative services
• To consult with other doctors and allied health professionals involved in your care
• To use electronic prescribing services
How can you access and correct your personal information?
You have a right to seek access to, and correction of, the personal information which we hold about you. For details on how to access and correct your health record, please contact our practice.
How do we hold your personal information?
Our staff are trained and required to respect and protect your privacy. We take reasonable steps to protect information from misuse, loss, unauthorised access, modification, or disclosure. This includes:
• Holding your information on a secure database including the use of secure third-party service providers (such as AI-enabled clinical documentation tools)
• Holding any physical records in a lockable cabinet
• Maintaining document retention and secure destruction policies
Anonymity and pseudonyms
The Privacy Act provides that individuals must have the option of not identifying themselves, or of using a pseudonym, when dealing with our practice, except in circumstances where it is impracticable for us to provide services without identification.