sportsmed is committed to protecting your privacy. This privacy statement explains the type of personal and sensitive information including health information we collect, and how we handle that information as part of your relationship with sportsmed.
We understand that the information that you entrust to us is private and confidential. Any personal information collected by sportsmed is treated as confidential and follows the Australian Privacy Principles as contained in the Privacy Act 1988. All sportsmed staff sign a confidentiality agreement upon employment and are trained to respect your privacy in accordance with the applicable privacy laws and our own policies and procedures.
In this privacy statement ‘personal information’ means information or an opinion about an identified individual or an individual who is reasonably identifiable, whether the information or opinion is true or not, or whether the information or opinion is recorded in a material form or not.
Personal information includes ‘sensitive information’ (which includes health information and information or an opinion about an individual’s racial origin, political opinion, membership of a political association or trade union, religious beliefs, sexual preferences or criminal record) and ‘health information’ (which includes information or opinion about the health or a disability of an individual, the individual’s wishes about the provision of health services, or health services provided or to be provided to an individual). In this privacy statement, a reference to personal information includes both sensitive and health information.
sportsmed may hold the following information:
- Name, address, telephone number(s)
- Date of birth
- Sex
- Marital status
- Email address
- Occupation
- Medicare card number
- Health information
- General practitioner
- Referring Doctor
- Returned service organisation
- Transaction details associated with services we have provided to you
- Any additional information provided to us by you
- Any information you provided to us through patient surveys and feedback forms
sportsmed will destroy or de-identify personal information due to redundancy, after our legal obligations to retain the information have expired.
Any information provided, including identification of individuals, will be used only for the purpose/s intended and where the intention includes confidentiality, information will be treated as such unless otherwise required by law.
Personal information collected by sportsmed may include your name, date of birth, address, contact details and private health insurance details.
Sensitive information collected by sportsmed may include information about your health or medical history.
We generally collect personal information in person, in writing, by telephone, email or via our website.
For example, we may collect information when you:
- Make an appointment to see a surgeon
- Book a surgical procedure
- Have customer interactions with us where we record system notes, voice recordings or telephone conversations
- Use our website feedback function
- Complete a patient survey regarding our services.
If you contact us with an enquiry about our services via our website or any other communication channel, we may use your personal information to contact you for the purposes of providing you with further information, and/or to follow up whether you have any interest in acquiring services from us. You can let us know any time in writing, or by calling us on the telephone number listed within the ‘Direct Marketing and Your Privacy’ section if you no longer wish to be contacted for these purposes. Your consent will remain current until you advise us otherwise.
Where you have provided us with personal information about other individuals (in writing or verbally) such as for your next of kin, you must ensure that they are aware or will be made aware that you have provided their personal information to us, and how we will handle their personal information. If the information you are providing to us is health or sensitive information you must first obtain their consent before providing information to us.
We may also collect personal information from third parties such as:
- Health fund providers: to check your health fund eligibility and comply with such laws as Private Health Insurance Act 2007 (Cth) and the National Health Act 1953 (Cth)
- Other health care services to verify information you have provided to us
- The policy holder who is responsible for the management of your health insurance membership, or is authorised to provide us with information on your behalf, regarding your private health insurance cover and fees associated with our services
- Intermediaries who provide health services on behalf of sportsmed, such as physiotherapy, radiology, pathology, medical physician and other associated health care providers.
sportsmed collects, holds, uses and discloses your personal information in order to provide you with health care related services including:
- Managing our ongoing relationship with you
- Answering any queries you may have in relation to health care services
- Assessing your suitability for health services in our facility – you may be referred to another health care facility under the care of our surgeon if your health history deems this necessary for your health and wellbeing
- Providing you with the opportunity to participate in other health and wellness programs conducted at sportsmed such as use of the onsite gymnasium in your rehabilitation program
- Conducting patient surveys including satisfaction and feedback
- Conducting market research and analysis
- Managing reviews to develop and improve our services.
We may also collect, hold, use and disclose your personal information in order to:
- Train personnel
- Resolve any legal and/or commercial complaints or issues in relation to compensation recovery
- Meet legislative requirements relating to health care providers
- Perform any of our functions and activities relating to our business.
We will generally only use personal information for the purpose for which it is collected, or for a purpose that is related to the services you are provided at sportsmed.
We use personal information about you to:
- Provide medical treatment and care to you
- Assist your treating doctors, our team and other allied health professionals to provide medical treatment and care to you
- Assist us to provide you with information about your care, if required
- Assist with our internal administrative requirements
- Process private health fund claims
- Supply information to medical practitioners, nurses and other allied health professionals who provide necessary follow up treatment and ongoing care
- Assist in the process of benchmarking and clinical indicator reporting in a de-identified form
- Provide data in both an identified and de-identified form to state government agencies, in compliance with numerous legislative requirements
- Provide data in a de-identified form to the private data bureau
- Research and development
- Service planning
- Communication of offers and special events
- Marketing.
sportsmed will not sell or disclose your personal details for any purpose that is not related to your relationship with us.
We rely on third parties such as health care funds and other service providers (pharmacy, radiology, pathology, physiotherapy) to perform specialised activities for sportsmed and your personal information may be provided to these third parties to enable them to perform their agreed services.
sportsmed may also be required to disclose your information to comply with legislation.
We may disclose personal information for the purposes described under the heading ‘For what purpose do we collect, hold, use and disclose your personal information?’ to our contracted service providers as listed above, as well as government authorities (Medicare Australia), other hospitals, medical and general treatment providers and persons authorised by you in the processes of our service provision.
If you are not the policy holder of the nominated private health fund elected to use for the provision of services at sportsmed, we may also disclose your personal information to the policy holder as part of administering and processing your eligibility for care under private health insurance provisions.
This may include the disclosure of sensitive and health information about services being used by you under the policy holder’s membership.
We may also disclose personal information to parties involved in a prospective or actual transfer or our assets of business.
We try to ensure that personal information we hold is accurate, complete and up to date. Please let us know if there are any errors in your personal information and keep us up to date with changes to your personal information such as change of address. You will be requested to check and update your personal information on each visit to our health services.
If you believe that personal information that we hold about you is incorrect, incomplete or inaccurate, then you may request amendments.
We will consider if the information requires amendment and if we do not agree, we will add a note to the personal information stating your disagreement with the information.
You may request access to your personal information held by sportsmed by writing to the manager of the area of the business (hospital or orthopaedics,) that you wish to gain the information from.
You are not required to provide a reason for requesting access. Where we hold information that you are entitled to access, we will endeavour to provide you with a suitable range of choices as to how it may be collected (e.g. post or collection).
Marketing and your privacy
From time to time we may contact you to provide you with information about our services. When we contact you, it may be by mail, telephone, email, sms and/or via digital media channels.
When you become a patient of sportsmed you consent to us using your personal information for marketing purposes (for an indefinite period including after you may cease accessing our services), unless you contact us to withdrawal your consent. Our most common form of marketing is via email which you may elect to opt-out of. We also offer you a number of opportunities to opt-out of any marketing as you receive them.
If you are currently receiving marketing materials and wish to opt out, you can do so by following the unsubscribed links on emails or you can contact:
Email: pr@sportsmed.com.au
Mail: sportsmed
Att: Marketing and Communications Manager
PO Box 61, Stepney SA 5069
Telephone: 08 8130 1222
If you request not to receive marketing material, please note that we will still contact you in relation to our on-going relationship with you whilst you undergo health services with us. For example, we will send you health service information, appointment notifications, bills, patient satisfaction surveys, statements and notices that are relevant to the services for which you are accessing at sportsmed.
If you have any queries, concerns or complaints about the manner in which your personal information has been collected or handled by sportsmed, please refer to sportsmed Privacy, Confidentiality and Freedom of Information Policy.
sportsmed does not knowingly store any information on computer servers outside of Australia or release personal information outside of Australia.
How to access our Privacy Policy?
For a copy of our Privacy Policy, please contact us at pr@sportsmed.com.au.
Alternatively, you can call us on:
Orthopaedic Reception
T 08 8362 7788
Website privacy
Our website address is: http://www.sportsmed.com.au
What personal data we collect and why we collect it
When visitors leave comments on the site we collect the data shown in the comments form, and also the visitor’s IP address and browser user agent string to help spam detection.
An anonymized string created from your email address (also called a hash) may be provided to the Gravatar service to see if you are using it. The Gravatar service privacy policy is available here: https://automattic.com/privacy/. After approval of your comment, your profile picture is visible to the public in the context of your comment.
If you upload images to the website, you should avoid uploading images with embedded location data (EXIF GPS) included. Visitors to the website can download and extract any location data from images on the website.
If you submit an enquiry form through the website your details will be stored for further follow up.
Registrations and patient health history form submissions are not stored on the website and are deleted permanently automatically from the website content management system once submitted.
Cookies
If you leave a comment on our site you may opt-in to saving your name, email address and website in cookies. These are for your convenience so that you do not have to fill in your details again when you leave another comment. These cookies will last for one year.
If you visit our login page, we will set a temporary cookie to determine if your browser accepts cookies. This cookie contains no personal data and is discarded when you close your browser.
When you log in, we will also set up several cookies to save your login information and your screen display choices. Login cookies last for two days, and screen options cookies last for a year. If you select “Remember Me”, your login will persist for two weeks. If you log out of your account, the login cookies will be removed.
If you edit or publish an article, an additional cookie will be saved in your browser. This cookie includes no personal data and simply indicates the post ID of the article you just edited. It expires after 1 day.
Embedded content from other websites
Articles on this site may include embedded content (e.g. videos, images, articles, etc.). Embedded content from other websites behaves in the exact same way as if the visitor has visited the other website.
These websites may collect data about you, use cookies, embed additional third-party tracking, and monitor your interaction with that embedded content, including tracking your interaction with the embedded content if you have an account and are logged in to that website.
How long we retain your data
If you leave a comment, the comment and its metadata are retained indefinitely. This is so we can recognize and approve any follow-up comments automatically instead of holding them in a moderation queue.
For users that register on our website (if any), we also store the personal information they provide in their user profile. All users can see, edit, or delete their personal information at any time (except they cannot change their username). Website administrators can also see and edit that information.
What rights you have over your data
If you have an account on this site, or have left comments, you can request to receive an exported file of the personal data we hold about you, including any data you have provided to us. You can also request that we erase any personal data we hold about you. This does not include any data we are obliged to keep for administrative, legal, or security purposes.
Where we send your data
Visitor comments may be checked through an automated spam detection service.
