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ADAMS
Phone: (217) 277-2001
Fax: (217) 277-2006
THIS NOTICE DESCRIBES HOW MEDICAL INFORMATION ABOUT YOU MAY BE USED AND DISCLOSED AND HOW YOU CAN GET ACCESS TO THIS INFORMATION. PLEASE REVIEW IT CAREFULLY.
Purpose of this Notice:
Adams County Ambulance & EMS is required by law to
maintain the privacy of certain confidential health care
information, know as Protected Health Information or PHI,
and to provide you with a notice of our legal duties and
privacy practices with respect to your PHI.
This Notice describes your legal rights, advises you
of our privacy practices, and lets you know how the Adams
County Ambulance & EMS is permitted to use and disclose PHI
about you.
Adams
County Ambulance & EMS is also required to abide by the
terms of the version of this Notice currently in effect.
In most situations we may use this information as
described in this Notice without your permission, but there
are some situations where we may use it only after we obtain
your written authorization, if we are required by law to do
so.
Uses and Disclosures of PHI:
The Adams County Ambulance & EMS may use PHI for the
purpose of treatment, payment, and health care operations,
in most cases without your written permission.
Examples of our use of your PHI:
For
treatment:
This includes such things as verbal and written
information that we obtain about you and use pertaining to
your medical condition and treatment provided to you by us
and other medical personnel (including doctors and nurses
who give orders to allow us to provide treatment to you).
It also includes information we give to other health
care personnel to whom we transfer you care and treatment,
and includes transfer of PHI via radio or telephone to the
hospital or dispatch center as well as providing the
hospital with a copy of the written record we create in the
course of providing you with treatment and transport.
For
payment:
This includes any activities we must undertake in
order to get reimbursed for the services we provide to you,
including such things as organizing your PHI and submitting
bills to insurance companies (either directly or through a
third party billing company), management of billed claims
for services rendered, medical necessity determinations and
reviews, utilization review, and collection of outstanding
accounts.
For
health care operations:
This includes quality assurance activities,
licensing, and training programs to ensure that our
personnel meet our standards of care and follow established
policies and procedures, obtaining legal and financial
services, conducting business planning, processing
grievances and complaints, and creating reports that do not
individually identify you for data collection purposes.
Use and Disclosure of PHI Without Your Authorization: Adams County Ambulance & EMS is permitted to use PHI without your written authorization, or opportunity to object in certain situations, including:
For Adams County Ambulance & EMS use in treating you or in obtaining payment for services provided to you or in other health care operations;
For the treatment activities of another health care provider;
To another health care provider or entity for the payment activities of the provider or entity that receives the information (such as your hospital or insurance company);
To another health care provider (such as the hospital to which you are transported) for the health care operations activities of the entity that receives the information as long as the entity receiving the information has or has had a relationship with you and the PHI pertains to that relationship;
For health care fraud and abuse detection or for activities related to compliance with the law;
To a family member, other relative, or close personal friend or other individual involved in your care if we obtain your verbal agreement to do so or if we give you an opportunity to object to such a disclosure and you do not raise an objection. We may also disclose health information to your family, relatives, or friends if we infer from the circumstances that you would not object. For example, we may assume you agree to our disclosure of your personal health information to your spouse when your spouse has called the ambulance for you. In situations where you are not capable of objecting (because you are not present or due to your incapacity or medical emergency), we may, in our professional judgment, determine that a disclosure to your family member, relative or friend is in your best interest. In that situation, we will disclose only health information relevant to that person’s involvement in your care. For example, we may inform the person who accompanied you in the ambulance that you have certain symptoms and we may give that person a update on your vital signs and treatment that is being administered by our ambulance crew;
To a public health authority in certain situations (such as reporting a birth, death or disease as required by law, as part of a public health investigation, to report child or adult abuse or neglect or domestic violence, to report adverse events such as product defects, or to notify a person about exposure to a possible communicable disease as required by law;
For health oversight activities including audits or government investigations, inspections, disciplinary proceedings, and other administrative or judicial actions undertaken by the government (or their contractors) by law to oversee the health care system;
For judicial and administrative proceedings as required by a court or administrative order, or in some cases in response to a subpoena or other legal process;
For law enforcement activities in limited situations, such as when there is a warrant for the request, or when the information is needed to locate a suspect or stop a crime;
For military, national defense and security and other special government functions;
To avert a serious threat to the health and safety of a person or the public at large;
For workers’ compensation purposes, and in compliance with workers’ compensation laws;
To coroners, medical examiners, and funeral directors for identifying a deceased person, determining cause of death, or carrying on their duties as authorized by law;
If you are an organ donor, we may release health information to organizations that handle organ procurement organ, eye or tissue transplantation or to an organ donation bank, as necessary to facilitate organ donation and transplantation;
For research projects, but this will be subject to strict oversight and approvals and health information will be released only when there is a minimal risk to your privacy and adequate safeguards are in place in accordance with the law;
We may
use or disclose health information about you in a way that
does not personally identify you or reveal who you are.
Any
other use or disclosure of PHI, other than those listed
above will only be made with your written authorization,
(the authorization must specifically identify the
information we seek to use or disclose, as well as when and
how we seek to use or disclose it).
You may revoke your authorization at any time,
in writing, except to the extent that we have already used
or disclosed medical information in reliance on that
authorization.
Patient Rights:
As a patient, you have a number of rights with
respect to the protection of your PHI, including:
The
right to access, copy or inspect
your PHI.
This means you may come to our office and inspect and
copy most of the medical information about you that we
maintain. We
will normally provide you with access to this information
within 30 days of your request.
We may also charge you a reasonable fee for you to
copy any medical information that you have the right to
access. In
limited circumstances, we may deny you access to your
medical information, and you may appeal certain types of
denials.
We have
available forms to request access to your PHI at our office
and we will provide a written response if we deny you access
and let you know your appeal rights.
If you wish to inspect and copy your medial
information, you should contact the office staff or the
privacy officer listed at the end of this Notice.
The
right to amend your PHI:
You have the right to ask us to amend written medical
information that we may have about you.
We will generally amend your information within 60
days of your request and will notify you when we have
amended the information only in certain circumstances, like
when we believe the information you have asked us to amend
is correct. If
you wish to request that we amend the medical
information, that we have about you,
you should contact the office staff or the privacy officer
listed at the end of this Notice.
The
right to request an accounting of our use and disclosure of
your PHI:
You may request an accounting from us of certain
disclosures of your medical information that we have made in
the last six years prior to the date of your request.
We are not required to give you an accounting of
information we have used or disclosed for purposes of
treatment, payment or health care operations, or when we
share your health information with our business associates.
We are
also not required to give you an accounting of our
uses of PHI for which you have already given us written
authorization.
If you wish to request an accounting of the medical
information about you that we have used or disclosed that is
not exempted from the accounting requirement, you should
contact the office staff or the privacy officer listed at
the end of this Notice.
The
right to request that we restrict the uses and disclosures
of your PHI:
You have the right to request that we restrict how we
use and disclose your medical information that we have about
you for treatment, payment or health care operations, or to
restrict the information that is provided to family, friends
and other individuals involved in your health care.
But if you request a restriction and the information
you asked us to restrict is needed to provide you with
emergency treatment, then we may use the PHI or disclose the
PHI to a health care provider to provide you with emergency
treatment.
Adams County Ambulance & EMS is not required to agree to any
restrictions you request, but any restrictions agreed to by
Adams County Ambulance & EMS are binding on Adams County
Ambulance & EMS.
Internet and Electronic Mail, and the Right to Obtain a Copy
of Paper Notice on Request:
We will prominently
post a copy of this Notice on our portion of the
Revisions to the Notice:
Adams County Ambulance & EMS reserves the right to
change the terms of this Notice at any time, and the changes
will be effective immediately and will apply to all
protected health information that we maintain.
Any material changes to the Notice will be promptly
posted in our facilities and posted to our portion of
Your
Legal Rights and Complaints:
You also have the right to complain to us, or to the
Secretary of the United States Department of Health and
Human Services if you believe your privacy rights have been
violated. You
will not be retaliated against in any way for filing a
complaint with us or to the government.
Should you have any questions, comments or complaints
you may direct all inquires to the Adams County Ambulance &
EMS office staff or the privacy officer listed at the end of
this Notice.
Individuals will not be retaliated against for filing a
complaint.
I
f you have any questions or if you wish to file a complaint or exercise any rights listed in this Notice, please contact:
(217) 277-2001
or
Paul Davis, Ambulance Director & Privacy Office
(217) 277-2001