Notice of Privacy Practices

Red River Secure Transport

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: Red River Secure Transport (RRST) is required by law to maintain the privacy of certain confidential health care information, known 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. By signing this notice you consent to audio and video recording at all times during all phases of transport including audio and video recording during transport, loading, unloading, or any other interaction with an RRST employee, vehicle, or other agent. This Notice describes your legal rights, advises you of our privacy practices, and lets you know how RRST is permitted to use and disclose PHI about you. RRST 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: RRST may use PHI for the purposes of transportation, payment, and health care operations, in most cases without your written permission. Examples of our use of your PHI:

· For Transportation Operations. 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 other medical personnel (including doctors and nurses who give orders to allow us to provide transportation to you). It also includes information we give to other health care personnel to whom we transfer your care and treatment and includes transfer of PHI via radio or telephone to the hospital or dispatch center as well as providing the hospital or receiving facility with a copy of the written record we create in the process of providing you with transportation.

· 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), sending facilities, hospitals, 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 and follow established policies and procedures, obtaining legal and financial services, conducting business planning, processing grievances and complaints, creating reports that do not individually identify you for data collection purposes, and certain marketing activities.

· Reminders for Scheduled Transports and Information or Other Services. We may also contact you to provide you with a reminder of any scheduled appointments for non-emergency transportation, or for other information about alternative services we provide or other health-related benefits and services that may be of interest to you.

Use and Disclosure of PHI Without Your Authorization. RRST is permitted to use PHI without your written authorization, or opportunity to object in certain situations, including:

· For RRST’s use in transporting you or in obtaining payment for services provided to you or in other health care operations including audio and video recording during transport, loading, unloading, or any interaction with an RRST employee, vehicle, or other agent.

· 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. In situations where you are not capable of objecting 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.

· 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;

· 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. Specifically, we must obtain your written authorization before using or disclosing your: (a) psychotherapy notes, other than for the purpose of carrying out our own operations, payment, or health care operations purposes, (b) PHI for marketing when we receive payment to make a marketing communication; 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 reach out to our offices 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. 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 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 medical information, you should contact our Executive director.

· 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. We are permitted by law to deny your request to amend your medical 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 our Executive director.

· 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, like a billing company or a medical facility from/to which we have transported you. We are also not required to give you an accounting of our uses of protected health information 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 our offices.

· Right to pay out of pocket. You have the right to restrictions on disclosures of your PHI to health plans if you pay out-of-pocket in full.

· Right to notice of a breach of unsecured protected health information. If we discover that there has been a breach of your unsecured PHI, we will notify you about that breach within 48 hours of discover by first-class mail dispatched to the most recent address that we have on file. If you prefer to be notified about breaches by electronic mail, please contact our Executive director, to make RRST aware of this preference and to provide a valid email address to send the electronic notice. You may withdraw your agreement to receive notice by email at any time by contacting our offices.

Revisions to the Notice: RRST reserves the right to change the terms of this Notice at any time, with changes effective immediately and will apply to all PHI that we maintain. Any changes to the Notice will be promptly posted in our offices, and you are available upon written request.

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. If you have any questions or if you wish to file a complaint or exercise any rights listed in this Notice, please contact our offices.