You wouldn’t be reading this if you weren’t concerned about online privacy. Everyone should be, yet most people have no idea all the places their personal information resides and who’s doing what with it.
I certainly don’t. All I know is what happens to the personal and health information of Rx Savings Solutions members—and, more importantly, what doesn’t.
- By using Rx Savings Solutions, members consent to our collection/use/disclosure of their personal information, but only for the purposes of providing our service.
- We only disclose PHI under a Business Associate Agreement where the third party has put in place the same HIPAA-compliant safeguards to protect the privacy of members’ information that we have.
- We may use and disclose health information with service providers for data analytics purposes, but it is always “de-identified,” i.e. not attached to any member’s identity and contains no protected health information.
- At times we may gather and keep track of information on a member’s activity on the member portal. We do so purely to improve the product and user experience. Unlike many websites, we track activity ONLY within our own site, never other web browsing.
You’ve probably seen a flood of notices lately from the websites you visit or apps you use regarding changes to their privacy practices. You can always tell when new regulations go into effect. No surprise, we’ve updated ours too, effective Feb. 1.
Here are the two key additions:
- Rx Savings Solutions will not use or disclose a member’s genetic information in a way that violates the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act (“GINA”).
- We include a Privacy Notice to California Residents that ensures we comply with the California Consumer Privacy Act of 2018 (CCPA) to the fullest applicable extent. (Any PHI we collect under the authority of HIPAA is exempt from CCPA.)
No one ever reads every privacy policy, do they? But no one really knows what they’re signing away when they check the box or click “Agree.”
It’s one thing to have information on your buying patterns tracked, analyzed, shared or sold. Or your political leanings. Or your retina. Your personal health information is an entirely different matter, and something that deserves the utmost privacy and protection.
