Notice of Privacy Practices

Valencia Medical & Research Center (“VMRC”) is required by applicable federal and Florida law to protect the privacy of your health information (“protected health information” or “PHI”). This Notice describes our privacy practices with respect to your PHI, and we follow the terms of the Notice currently in effect.

We may use and disclose your PHI without your written authorization for the following purposes:

• Treatment. To provide, coordinate, or manage your healthcare and related services.
• Payment. To bill and obtain payment for services from you or a study sponsor. We do not bill health insurance plans.
• Healthcare operations. For quality assessment, training, audits, and general business activities of the clinic.
• As required by law. When required to report by federal, state, or local law (for example, reporting abuse, communicable diseases, or responding to a valid court order).
• Public health. To authorized public-health authorities for purposes such as preventing or controlling disease.

For all other uses and disclosures of your PHI, including marketing communications and most disclosures involving psychotherapy notes, we will obtain your written authorization. You may revoke an authorization at any time, in writing, except to the extent we have already acted in reliance on it.

If you choose to participate in a clinical study at VMRC, your PHI may be used and disclosed as described in the study’s Informed Consent Form and HIPAA Research Authorization. You will be given the opportunity to read and sign these documents before any study-related procedure takes place. Participation is voluntary, and you may withdraw at any time without affecting your routine medical care.

• Right to inspect and copy. You may request a copy of your PHI in our designated record set.
• Right to amend. You may request an amendment if you believe your PHI is incorrect or incomplete.
• Right to an accounting of disclosures. You may request a list of certain disclosures of your PHI we have made.
• Right to request restrictions. You may request that we limit how we use or disclose your PHI. We will consider but are not required to agree to all requested restrictions.
• Right to confidential communications. You may ask us to contact you at a specific phone number or address.
• Right to a paper copy of this Notice. You may request a paper copy at any time.
• Right to be notified of a breach. We will notify you if a breach of your unsecured PHI occurs.

If you believe your privacy rights have been violated, you may file a complaint with us at the contact information below, with the Florida Department of Health, or, where HIPAA applies, with the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Office for Civil Rights at:

200 Independence Avenue, S.W.
Washington, D.C. 20201
Phone: 1-877-696-6775
Web: hhs.gov/ocr

We will not retaliate against you for filing a complaint.

We include this section for transparency about how our website works. We use Cloudflare Turnstile, a service of Cloudflare, Inc., to protect some of our website forms from automated spam and misuse. When the verification widget on one of these forms loads, Cloudflare receives technical information such as your IP address, your browser’s user agent (which describes the browser and operating system you use), the characteristics of your browser’s secure connection (known as a TLS fingerprint), the results of automated checks the widget runs in your browser, the full web address of the page you are on and of the page you came from, general information about the page and the form (for example, how many fields the form has), and our website’s Turnstile key. When you submit the form, we send Cloudflare the verification token and your IP address to confirm the result. We do not send Cloudflare what you enter in our forms, and Cloudflare states that Turnstile does not access, store, or transmit form entries. Cloudflare uses this technical information to detect and block bots on our website, and also for its own purpose of improving Turnstile’s bot detection, as described in its Turnstile Privacy Addendum (cloudflare.com/turnstile-privacy-policy).

We reserve the right to change this Notice and our privacy practices. The new Notice will be effective for all PHI that we maintain at that time. We will post the revised Notice in our clinic and on this website with the new effective date.