Privacy and Confidentiality



Our Privacy Commitment to You

At Odyssey Health Services (OHS), maintaining your privacy and confidentiality is extremely important to us.  We follow various healthcare privacy legislations across Canada, including PHIPA, to establish the mandatory requirements and responsibilities of OHS for the protection of your Personal Health Information (PHI) that is received or disclosed by OHS.

Personal Health Information (PHI) is defined as information that is collected, used or disclosed by Health Information Custodians (HICs) in either oral or written form; the information relates to the individuals physical or mental health, including family history; relates to the provision of health care; relates to payment or eligibility for health care; is the individual’s health number; any information included in a record containing PHI; as well as other definitions that don’t directly relate to the services provided by OHS.

All the information that we gather about you, in the interview, in various meetings, and from other health care professionals, is gathered with your explicit consent.  It is maintained in your file, under the control of our professional staff and is released only with your consent (with the exceptions noted below).  Reports are provided to third parties and to other health care professionals only with your written consent (see exceptions).

Administrative staff will be involved in activities such as typing, proofreading, copying, filing, receiving, and sending mail and receiving and placing phone calls.  These staff are trained to adhere to all privacy and confidentiality legislation.  When information must be mailed, emailed, or faxed, appropriate caution is exercised to ensure accuracy of destination addresses and numbers and that receiving health care professionals exercise appropriate protection of privacy.  Considerable efforts are made to ensure that methods of information transmission are secure and protected from tampering.

Odyssey Health Services collects, uses, and discloses your personal health information for the following purposes:

  • To provide the programs offered by OHS to its clients; to do this we need to review past and current health states of our clients.
  • To obtain payment for services provided from your insurer.
  • To teach students and provide continuing education to our staff as well as for training new individuals who join OHS.
  • To conduct quality improvement and risk management activities.
  • To comply with our regulatory obligations to various provincial Colleges of Psychologists, the College of Registered Psychotherapists of Ontario, the College of Kinesiologists of Ontario, etc.
  • To continuously analyze the effectiveness of the interventions used in our programs; to do this we summarize de-identified data in papers submitted for scientific or professional publication. Such publications allow for examination of our methodology and outcome statistics by the scientific community, without compromising an individual’s right to privacy.  Your data may be included in such analyses, but always in a way that your individual privacy is protected.

Your insurer (including various automobile insurers, workers’ compensation boards and long-term disability carriers) or employer may require that you consent to the provision of reports to them or your access to benefits or employment may be affected.  You should ensure that you understand any such consequences to withholding consent, and we will make every effort to ensure that you understand such circumstances.  In some cases, if you deny us your consent to communicate with your other health care professionals, we may not be able to continue with our assessment or treatment, because a specific communication is vital to clinical practice.  We would advise you of this and if you still wish to withhold consent we would not proceed under such circumstances.

Exceptions to Confidentiality

There are some instances where the information we have collected may need to be disclosed to other parties and will not require us to obtain consent from the client to do so.  These instances are called mandatory reporting requirements and are listed below. Please note the details of the requirements may vary by province. Your Odyssey Health Services treatment provider will inform you of these details. You may ask questions for clarification at any time.

  1. There are statutory requirements that oblige us to report circumstances where we have information to suspect a vulnerable person may be at risk of harm, or where an individual has been sexually abused by a regulated health care professional.
  2. If we think an individual is an immediate risk to themselves or to others, we may break confidentiality in order to protect the life of the individual or others.
  3. We may be ordered by the courts or police to produce records that the court or the police require.
  4. Investigators may audit our conduct and practice. The investigators may look through your file without your permission to see that our service or professionals are meeting appropriate standards.
  5. In certain cases, if an individual has been injured at work or in a motor vehicle accident, where payment for treatment services or income replacement benefits are available from a government body (e.g., a Workers’ Compensation Board), legislation may permit the body to demand relevant reports (e.g., work-related injuries or automobile accident-related injuries) without the consent of the individual.

Access to Health Records

You have the right to seek access to your health records that we keep as well as ask us to correct a record if you believe it is inaccurate or incomplete.  We do our best to create accurate records and reports, and sometimes will have the client review the report prior to it being finalized.  If there is an inaccurate fact or reflection of an event in a report that has been circulated, we will correct it through an addendum or next update once discussions with the client and author have occurred.

Questions or Concerns?

If you have questions or want to make a complaint about our privacy practices, please contact our Privacy Officer, Michelle Hocking at michellehocking@ohs-jma.com.

You also have the right to complain to the Information and Privacy Commissioner of Ontario (www.ipc.on.ca) or any regulatory college of Psychologists, Psychotherapists or Kinesiologists (based on the province our staff member is registered in).

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