At Demeter Fertility our primary concern is providing you with treatment and healthcare of the highest quality. This requires a relationship of trust and confidentiality – one where we treat your personal health information appropriately and respect your privacy.
As such, we will handle your personal information in accordance with this Privacy Policy and in compliance with our obligations under the Privacy Act 1988 (Cth) (Privacy Act) .
Our fertility doctors, nurses, scientists, counsellors and administration staff work together to provide your fertility treatment. They may need access to your personal health information to make sure we provide the most appropriate care.
You are entitled to know what personal information is held about you, how you can access it, why it is held, to whom we may disclose it, and when we need your consent to do this. This Policy explains all these details. You can discuss any issue relating to the privacy of your information with your doctor or any staff member, at any time.
Collecting information
Our fertility team and staff collect information that helps us provide the level of advice, care and management you need, or where there is a statutory requirement for collection.
This information may include:
- contact details and date of birth
- relationship status
- medical history
- family medical history
- symptoms, diagnosis and recommended treatment
- ethnicity
- Medicare/private health fund details, and
- billing or account details.
We normally collect this information directly from you, but we may need to get it from other sources – for example, from other medical practitioners, health funds or health providers and, with your consent, from family members.
Purposes for handling your information
To ensure we provide you with the most appropriate treatment, our fertility specialists and staff may collect, hold, use and disclose your personal information for any of the following purposes:
- sharing your information within the treatment team;
- communicating with the referring medical practitioners;
- referrals to other medical practitioners, hospitals or health providers;
- referring specimens to external laboratories for analysis;
- accounts and billing, including Medicare and private health insurance claims
- managing our practice – including quality assurance, practice accreditation, market analysis and keeping our records up to date;
- complaints and incident handling, and notifications to our insurers;
- disclosure, where legally required, to third parties – for example, in response to a court subpoena or for mandatory reporting of specific diseases;
- disclosure to our service providers, where doing so is necessary for your treatment or for our management and administrative purposes;
- providing a small sample of case-notes for confidential review as part of annual Code of Practice audits by the national Reproductive Technology Accreditation Committee (RTAC), or its agents, in compliance with regulatory requirements;
sharing your information with our clinical review committee (which has members who are not part of the Virtus Health Group), if necessary, so that they can determine if you meet our treatment guidelines; and - submitting a summary to the Australia and New Zealand Assisted Reproduction Database (ANZARD) of every treatment we perform. This information may be further supplied to other government and statutory bodies, all in compliance with regulatory requirements. In all these cases we remove any information that personally identifies you.
We may also use non-identifying information from your medical file for data analysis and research.
From time-to-time, we may send you information regarding operational updates, and about our products and services that may be of interest to you. You will be able to opt out of receiving these communications when you receive them or you can contact our privacy officer.
If you request us to send materials related to your treatment to another country we will be required to disclose your personal information to people in that country.
We use secure services, hosted in the United States, to manage communications and events. Accordingly, some of your personal information may be securely held by that service in the United States. We use globally hosted (country of storage changes intermittently) secure servers to process some patient and client information for market analysis purposes.
The diagnosis and treatment of infertility often involves more than one person (for example, your partner, donors or surrogates). Where you are undergoing treatment with a partner, it is our policy to share all your information with your partner UNLESS you tell us not to disclose your information to your partner.
What happens if we can’t collect your personal or health information?
If any of the personal or health information you provide is not accurate or complete, or you choose not to provide us with your personal information, it may detrimentally affect the services that we provide or we may be unable to provide you with our services at all.
Data quality and security
We take all reasonable steps to ensure the personal information we collect, use, hold or disclose is accurate, complete, up-to-date and relevant to the functions and services we provide. You can help us achieve this by providing correct and up-to-date information, as described in our Patient Rights and Responsibilities document. When we exchange your personal information internally, we will do so via encrypted emails where possible. If you ask us to exchange your personal information with an external party, we may send your personal information by unencrypted (ie, normal) email to ensure that the external recipient can access this information.
We store your personal information securely and protect it from unauthorised access, modification or disclosure.
Access and correction
In all but a few rare cases, you can access the personal information we hold about you, in part or in full, or ask us to provide it to a third party such as another healthcare provider.
We may require you to make this request in writing. There may be an administration fee for this service, depending on the nature of access required.
If you feel any of the personal information we hold about you is inaccurate or incomplete, please let us know. It is our policy to note your corrections and add them to your records. In accordance with good clinical practice, we do not erase the original record.
Our website
Our website uses “cookies”, which are pieces of data that are stored on your hard drive containing details about your use of our website. Cookies do not provide us with information about you that can be used to identify you, rather, they anonymously track usage of our website, so that we can enhance users’ experience of our website. You may elect to reject cookies and still use our website, however in doing so, you may be unable to access certain pages.
For what purposes do we collect, hold, and use your personal and health information?
Your personal and health information is collected and used to ensure you can be informed about the services that we provide, that you receive the best possible care if you become a patient of Demeter Fertility, and for us to manage the health services we provide to you effectively. It will also be used to:
- send communications (including results) to you and your treating doctors
- provide information and advice
- conduct business processing functions
- update our records and keep your contact details up to date
- respond to any complaint made by you
- comply with any law, rule, regulation, lawful and binding determination, decision or direction of a regulator, or in co-operation with any governmental authority
- It will also be used for the administrative, marketing, planning, product or service development, quality control and research purposes of Virtus Health Pty Limited and its related bodies corporate (as that term is defined in the Corporations Act 2001 (Cth)).
Retention of records
To ensure we comply with regulatory requirements, it is our policy to keep your medical records for at least seven years.
Complaints
We want to make sure your expectations about your privacy protection are the same as ours. If you have any concerns, please discuss them with your doctor or any member of our staff. If, after this discussion, you still have concerns, you can contact us in writing at hello@demeterfertility.com so that we can ensure your enquiry is best answered.
If you are still not satisfied, you may complain to:
Privacy Commissioner
Office of the Australian Information Commissioner
Level 8, Piccadilly Tower, 133 Castlereagh Street, Sydney NSW 2000
GPO Box 5218, Sydney NSW 1042
Privacy hotline 1300 363 992 Website www.privacy.gov.au
Changes to this Privacy Policy
We may make changes to this Privacy Policy at any time without notice to you. At any time, our current Privacy Policy is available on our website.