OUR PRIVACY POLICY

The Brock Health Administration Privacy Policy informs you of our commitment to your privacy regarding our Private Health Services Plan (PHSP). It describes how we ensure your privacy and how we maintain the confidentiality of your information. This policy applies to personal and corporate customers, including individuals carrying on business alone or in partnership with other individuals.

Why Do We Need Your Information?

Dealing with your confidential personal information is essential to our very operations at Brock Health Administration. As is the nature of that business, we collect and store information about you and your health claims. We need this for four reasons:

• to ensure you are eligible for coverage
• to adjudicate your claims in accordance with the Income Tax Act
• to record the financial details of the transactions
• to retain any tax related information for reporting purposes

What Do We Collect?

We limit the information we collect to what we need for the provision of our services. We use it only for that purpose. We obtain most of our information about you directly from you. We obtain some information about you from your employer; the plan holder of the Private Health Services Plan (PHSP). We do not collect additional personal information about you from any other third parties. We do not monitor or record your telephone discussions with our representatives with the temporary exception of optional voice mail or email messages you may choose to leave.

What Do We Share?

We do not share your personal information with any third parties, with the exception of Government of Canada regulatory bodies where we are required to do so by law.

How Do We Store and Handle Your Information?

As we require original paper copies of all health expenses, we store your information in paper format file storage with appropriate physical safeguards and security measures in our central office. We do not scan or store your health information in electronic format. We retain your personal and financial information in electronic format for the plan holder's year end tax reporting purposes only. All of your electronic personal information is stored on a separate computer system that is totally independent of our corporate network. Your personal and financial information is not physically accessible from the Internet. We will retain your paper health information only for tax enquiries. The length of time we store this information depends on regulatory requirements. This period may extend beyond the time you are a customer of Brock Health Administration Ltd. We will only store it for as long as it is legally necessary for Brock Health Administration Ltd. to information available for future enquiries. This is currently seven (7) years. At that point your information is securely shredded and destroyed. Similarly, your electronic personal information is retained only as long as you remain a customer of Brock Health Administration Ltd. and for seven (7) years after your last active health claim. At that time, your electronic records will be purged from our computer system. All employees and functionaries of Brock Health Administration are familiar with this policy and follow procedures to safeguard your privacy.

Our Website

When you go to our website and read pages, or move from page to page, or download content onto your computer, we do not record your personal identity in any way. We do, however, make use of Internet cookies to track the sequence and duration of which pages are viewed on our website. Our Internet cookie is a small, non-intrusive file stored on the computer connecting to our website. The purpose of these tracking cookies is to improve page sequence design and page content of our website. While you may view this as surreptitious marketing, our intention is simply to maximize the value of the website to our potential customers. We believe our service is sufficiently beneficial to our customers that we do not need to resort to any form of deceitful or misleading marketing. All information collected as a result of these Internet cookies is aggregated into a statistical data, and no information specifically about you in particular will be kept or used as a result of visiting our website.

Since original receipts are part of our records for audit purposes, we make use of Canada Post for delivery of records. The use of the Internet does not expedite the claims process in any way.

Email sent over the Internet is not encrypted and can be intercepted. Brock Health Administration will not request that you transmit confidential information to us regarding your Private Health Services Plan (PHSP) over the Internet. When filling out a claim or an application online, we require you to print the form and submit via Canada Post. We recommend caution when sending email messages to us and that you do not include confidential information in those messages.

When you send us an email or when you ask us to respond to you by email, we learn your exact email address and any information you have included in the email. We use your email address to acknowledge your comments and/or reply to your questions, and we will store your communication and our reply in case we correspond further. We will not sell your email address to anyone. We will use your email address to send you reminder notices. If you don't want us to contact you by email, you may tell us so at any time.

If you have any concerns, please contact our Privacy Officer.