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:
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.
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).