Smart Parents' Health Source Subscriber Privacy and Confidentiality Policy
Last Updated: January 24, 2001
Copyright © 2000, Medem, Inc., All rights reserved.
Medem Smart Parents' Health Source ("MSPHS") is an online service designed to deliver pertinent, high-quality children's health-related information to parents and guardians ("subscribers") via e-mail. This service delivers content that seems appropriate to the genders and ages of the children under each subscriber's care. To make this work we must collect and store some information from each subscriber. This policy statement tells you how that information is used and treated. We thank you for taking the time to learn about the Medem Smart Parents' Health Source Privacy and Confidentiality Policy.
Our Philosophy: Your trust is our greatest asset. We make every reasonable effort to ensure that information held by Medem in conjunction with MSPHS remains private, confidential, and secure, and that we disclose our information practices to you as clearly and fully as possible. Many of our business decisions, including the choice and design of MSPHS services, selection of technologies, and others, begin and end with considerations of your privacy and confidentiality. We also evaluate our third-party business relationships in those terms.
Changes To Policy: While our philosophy will not change, the details of the policy might change over time as we add additional services and form relationships with new business partners. We will notify you of such changes via the newsletter. When you refer back to this policy statement you can check the top of the page to see the date that the policy was last updated.
Contacting Us: If you have questions about this Privacy and Confidentiality Policy, the practices of MSPHS, or your dealings with Medem, or if you would like to provide comments, you can call us from 6:00 am to 6:00 pm PST, Monday through Friday, toll-free, at 877-926-3336 within the United States. You can also contact us at info@medem.com.
Service Ownership, Scope and Applicability of the Policy: This Policy applies only to the MSPHS service. Other Medem services, and the Member of the Medem Network medical practice Web sites, are covered by a more extensive and detailed policy. The MSPHS is owned and operated by Medem. For more information about the mission, history, management, and ownership of Medem, visit the corporate Web site at www.medem.com.
Your Choice To Use the Service: When you enroll, you are making an express, informed choice to use the MSPHS services and to provide the necessary information. Send an e-mail with the word UNSUBSCRIBE in the subject line to unsubscribe.MSPHS@medem.com or unsubscribe online.
Collection and Stewardship of Information:
- Collection: We only collect information that is needed to provide you with the MSPHS services. On the enrollment form, we provide explanations for why we ask for the various items of information and how the information is used.
- Segregation: The information collected from MSPHS subscribers is maintained in a database that is dedicated exclusively to MSPHS. The information is never linked to, or combined with, any other information held by Medem or obtained from third parties.
- Disclosure: The information is never disclosed to any third parties. Employees and contractors of Medem, Inc., as well as those who work for Medem business partners that are directly involved in the construction and/or hosting of Medem-powered sites and services, may have legitimate reasons to access personal information while developing new services or troubleshooting problems. Such access is granted on a strict, need-to-know basis.
- Physical Site Security: The facilities that house our technical infrastructure, offline and backup storage media, printed reports, and user data, are physically secured and attended. Access is strictly limited to only those individuals who have legitimate reasons to enter. Our technical infrastructure is protected by firewalls and other external intrusion countermeasures.
- Security Policies and Procedures: Our staff are trained and reminded of issues of privacy, confidentiality, and information security on an ongoing basis. The servers and network components within our hosting environments are periodically, and in some respects continuously, tested for security, reliability, and freedom from viruses. Medem is always engaged in an ongoing process of risk assessment, security audit, systems test, security awareness training, and policy revision.
- Encryption: We exercise great care in providing secure transmission of your information from your PC to our servers. When you transmit personal information to us, we encrypt it using Secure Socket Layer (SSL), the industry-standard encryption technology. Encryption provides a secure means to protect your information as it passes over the Internet to our servers.
Access To Your Information: You may unsubscribe at any time. This will delete our records of your information. You may then resubscribe at any time. This process of unsubscribing and resubscribing should be used whenever you need to make changes to your e-mail address or information about the children in your care.
Activity Tracking Data and Use of Cookies: We do not track online activities of MSPHS subscribers. When you use a browser to subscribe to MSPHS or to edit the information in your profile, we do use a session cookie to maintain state during those update transactions. We do not send permanent cookies to your computer. Our cookies cannot be used by third parties to track your activities on the Web.
Third Parties: We do not disclose your e-mail address or other MSPHS enrollment information to any third parties. MSPHS newsletters may contain sponsorship information and sponsors' promotional content. Medem makes no endorsement, either express or implied, of the sponsors or products whose content appears in the newsletters.
Bits and Pieces:
- Protecting Children's Privacy: The MSPHS service is not directed at children, it is directed at their parents and guardians. We make every reasonable effort to ensure that we do not accept personal information from persons who are under 13 years of age.
- Legal Requests: Medem cooperates with law enforcement inquiries as a matter of policy. We will use e-mail addresses and other available information to attempt to identify a user when we are legally compelled to do so or when we feel it is necessary to protect our services, sites, customers, or others.
- Legal Disclaimer: Unfortunately, no data protection method or combination of methods can be guaranteed 100 percent secure. We strive to protect your personal information as described in this policy, but we cannot ensure or warrant our ability to do so. As a result you use the MSPHS service at your own risk. Medem will not be liable for disclosures of your information due to errors in transmission or unauthorized acts of third parties.




