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Med-IQ understands how important
the privacy of personal information is to our physician-customers.
Med-IQ is committed to honoring your privacy, and to offering special
protections for any personal information you choose to share with
us. The document you are reading is our privacy policy, and it describes
what information we may collect about you, what uses we may make
of it, and what precautions we take against unauthorized access
or use of your information.
Continuing Medical Education
When you use our site or register for a Continuing Medical Education
("CME") or a Continuing Education ("CE") activity
through our Web site, we collect certain personally identifiable
information from you such as your name, e-mail address and mailing
address. In addition to personally identifiable information, we
collect aggregated non-personally identifiable information about
the activities undertaken by our users. We use the information that
we collect in several ways:
i. Med-IQ is accredited
by the Accreditation Council for Continuing Medical Education
("ACCME") to provide continuing medical education for
physicians. As an ACCME accredited entity, we are required periodically
to submit aggregated data about CME participants and the CME activities
we certify. We also provide personally identifiable information
to other accredited CME/CE providers who certify CME/CE activities
posted on Med-IQ’s web site, www.Med-IQ.com
as required by the ACCME and other accrediting bodies. These reports
may include personally identifiable information about you and
credits issued to you, for the purpose of maintaining records
that you can request from the accredited provider for up to six
(6) years;
ii. Commercial supporters
of CME/CE and other activities on our Web site will receive only
aggregated data about activities that are relevant to their interests
and/or the courses they support;
iii. Med-IQ staff will
have internal access to files containing personally identifiable
information, including evaluation forms and aggregated CME/CE
participant information. These files can be accessed in order
to respond to your questions or comments. Our staff may also use
personally identifiable information, including registration information
and evaluation data, in assessing educational needs and planning
marketing activities; and
iv. We may use the information
we collect as otherwise permitted in this Privacy Policy.
Use of Cookies
Cookies are a technology used by Med-IQ’s Web sites to identify
a user as the user moves through the Web site. Your browser allows
us to place some information on your computer's hard drive that
identifies the computer you are using. We use cookies to personalize
our Web sites and to track your usage across all of our Web sites.
Your Web browser can be set to allow you to control whether you
will accept cookies, reject cookies, or to notify you each time
a cookie is sent to you. If your browser is set to reject cookies,
Web sites that are cookie-enabled will not recognize you when you
return to the Web site, and some Web site functionality may be lost.
The Help section of your browser will tell you how to prevent your
browser from accepting cookies.
Uses We Make of Information
In this section of our privacy policy, we identify the ways we
may use information about you that we have collected.
Aggregate Data
We create aggregate data about visitors to our web sites for product
development and improvement activities. We also use it for market
analysis. We may provide information from our web sites in aggregate
form, with identifying information removed, to third parties. For
example, we may tell a health care partner what percentage of our
registered users reside in a particular geographical area. When
aggregated health information is provided, we pool it from many
individual records and strip it of any data that could be used to
identify an individual before it is used.
Third Parties
In addition to aggregate information (discussed previously), we
may share some kinds of information with third parties as described
below.
- Other Companies: We have strategic relationships
with other companies who support CME on our Web sites. When you
are interacting with those companies, different rules and privacy
policies may apply.
- Companies and People Who Work for Us: Because
we are a publishing company, we contract with other companies
and individuals to help us provide services. For example, we may
host some of our Web sites on another company's computers, hire
technical consultants to maintain our Web-based tools, or work
with companies to remove repetitive information from customer
lists, analyze data, provide marketing assistance, and provide
customer service. In order to perform their jobs, these other
companies may have limited access to some of the personal information
we maintain about our users. We require all such companies to
comply with the terms of our privacy policies, to limit their
access to any personal information to the minimum necessary to
perform their obligations, and not to use the information they
may access for purposes other than fulfilling their responsibilities
to us. We use our best efforts to limit the use of other companies
in areas where personally identifiable information may be involved.
If we discover that a third party inadvertently disclosed personal
information about any of our customers, we will take immediate action
to prevent further occurrences.
Protection of Information
In this section of our privacy policy, we discuss the security
measures we take to protect information that we have collected about
you.
General Policies
We have implemented technology and security policies, rules and
other measures to protect the personal data that we have under our
control from unauthorized access, improper use, alteration, unlawful
or accidental destruction, and accidental loss. We also protect
your information by requiring that all our employees and others
who have access to or are associated with the processing of your
data respect your confidentiality.
Storage of Health Information
Personally identifiable health information you share with us is
stored on our database servers at Med-IQ’s data centers or hosted
by third parties who have entered into agreements with us that require
them to observe our Privacy Policy. We have a firewall to prevent
individuals from accessing information without authorization. Data
centers are physically secure and protected from unauthorized access
by unauthorized persons. Physical access to the servers requires
individual authorization and authentication.
Information in our data centers is backed up routinely, in order
to aid in the recovery of information in the event of accidental
damage of information or due to a natural disaster. The backup media
is stored in a physically secure storage facility.
Access to Information and Choices
In this section of our privacy policy, we tell you how to obtain
and correct information we have about you, and how to choose what
types of information you may share with us.
Privacy Questions or Concerns about
One of Our Web Sites
For privacy questions or concerns about one of Med-IQ’s Web
sites, please contact Judy V. Lum, at jlum@med-iq.com,
(443) 543-5200.
Revision date: October 22, 2007
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