Privacy Policy

Healthetreatment, LLC (‘Healthetreatment’) Privacy Policy

Healthetreatment understands how important the privacy of personal information is to our users. This Privacy Policy explains the type of information collected, how it is used, how it may be shared with other parties, and what choices members have regarding their information. You are encouraged to read this policy as well as the Healthetreatment Terms and Conditions of Use.

By clicking the ‘Accept’ button during registration or by using the Healthetreatment Web site at healthetreatment.com (the ‘Site’), you explicitly accept, without limitation or qualification, the collection, use and transfer of the personal information provided by you in the manner described in this Privacy Policy. Please read this Privacy Policy carefully as it affects your rights and liabilities under law. If you disagree with the way we collect and process personal information collected on the Site, we recommend that you do not use the Site.

Our Accreditation and Privacy Seals

To give you confidence that we adhere to strict healthcare industry privacy standards and that we comply with our own privacy practices, we participate in the following external, independent programs:

Health on The Net Foundation – Healthetreatment complies with the principles of the HON Code of Conduct established by the Health on the Net Foundation. To verify our compliance, click on the HON logo.

Healthetreatment is a licensee of the TRUSTe Privacy Program. TRUSTe is an independent, organization whose mission is to build user’s trust and confidence in the Internet by promoting the use of fair information practices. This privacy statement covers the Web site healthetreatment.com. Because this Site wants to demonstrate its commitment to your privacy, it has agreed to disclose its information practices and have its privacy practices reviewed for compliance by TRUSTe.

If you have questions or concerns regarding this statement, you should first contact mbennett@healthetreatment.com. If you do not receive acknowledgement of your inquiry or your inquiry has not been satisfactorily addressed, you should contact TRUSTe at http://watchdog.truste.com/pvr.php?page=complaint&url=

TRUSTe will then serve as a liaison with Healthetreatment to resolve your concerns

INFORMATION WE COLLECT

You do not have to register as a member or give us any personal information in order to perform searches or to read content on our Site; however we do collect certain information about you when you visit our Site.

Cookies

Even if you do not register as a member of Healthetreatment, we collect information about your use of our Site through the use of cookies. Cookies are sent to your browser from the Site and stored on your computer. A cookie is a text file that is either stored in your computer’s memory temporarily (a ‘session’ cookie) or placed on your hard drive (a ‘persistent’ cookie) by a Web page server. Healthetreatment uses session cookies, that persist only while the browser is open and at the Site, and persistent cookies, that remain in the browser’s cookie file even after leaving the Site. These cookies enhance a user’s experience with easier navigation, additional functionality and a more personalized site experience. When you return to the Site, cookies enable us to retrieve information previously provided. For example, if you register as a member, a cookie helps us recall your specific information (such as username and password).

We do not link information from cookies to personal information without your permission and do not use cookies to collect or store health information about you.

Most browser software can be set to reject all cookies. Most browsers offer instructions on how to reset the browser to reject cookies in the “Help” section of the toolbar. If you reject our cookies, certain of the functions and conveniences of our Site may not work properly but you do not have to accept our cookies in order to productively use the Site.

We use another company to place cookies on your computer to collect non-personally identifiable information to compile aggregated statistics for us about visitors to our site.

Log Files

Healthetreatment tracks certain information of its users such as type of browser and operating system, IP address and ISP, and log on time for our own use. The information collected allows us to compile aggregated statistics about (i) our Site usage and (ii) member demographics and behavior on the Site. We keep this information so we can continuously improve our users’ online experience and improve the Site. None of this information can ever be traced back to a specific person and is useful only to Healthetreatment.

Widgets

Our Web site includes Widgets, which are interactive mini-programs that run on our site to provide specific services from another company (e.g. displaying the news, opinions, music, etc). Personal information, such as your email address, may be collected through the Widget. Cookies may also be set by the Widget to enable it to function properly. Information collected by this Widget is governed by the privacy policy of the company that created it.

Personal Information We Collect About You

When you register as a Healthetreatment member, you are asked to voluntarily provide certain information, including your email address, year of birth, gender, zip code and certain health information and resource information (as described more fully below). When you register, you will also be asked to create a username and a password. Your email address will not be made public on the Site. However you can choose to associate your username with comments and reviews that you provide about symptoms and/or treatments.

Health information is information members upload about their health status, as part of their user profile or in answer to Healthetreatment surveys. Examples of health information are details about conditions or diseases that members have, including the first notice of symptoms, date of diagnosis, co-existing conditions, family history, quality of life effects, list and severity of symptoms, timeline or progression of disease, results of health tests, details of treatments tried (e.g. dates, dosages, measures of effectiveness in terms of quality of life), and other factors that could possibly be related to or associated with the disease or condition (e.g. environmental factors, personal traits, ethnicity, and other factors as defined by members). Health Information you provide will be displayed in an anonymized and aggregate format. However, comments or reviews relating to a medical condition that you include will be linked to your username unless you request that such comments be shown anonymously by checking the appropriate box on the ‘My Preferences’ page on the Site.

Resource information is information members post about treatments, doctors, studies, things to read, or support resources, or reviews about their experience with the posted resources. Posted resources and reviews will be visible to all users on the Site, to help people learn from each others’ experiences.

Uses of Personal and Health Information

Collected health information is aggregated and anonymized and is publically available to allow members to conduct their own analysis. Such aggregate health information provides a list of symptoms and treatments for conditions and allows users to benchmark against other visitors with the same condition.

Healthetreatment is dedicated to accelerating the flow of health information through member-driven, patient-empowered data collection. Healthetreatment’s goal is to help people discover both short-term and long-term solutions that will help improve quality of life.

By registering with Healthetreatment, by managing your profile, or opting in when presented with choices, you have consented for us to use your information, subject to local law, in the following ways:

to allow you to create an account;
to create a profile for you based on information that you have provided to us;
to contact you about Site updates, informational and service-related communications, including important security updates;
to provide you additional communications, information, and promotions such as newsletters and condition or treatment updates;
to inform you of other products or services available from Healthetreatment;
to enable you to provide feedback, to contact us and for us to respond to you;
to conduct surveys, questionnaires, promotions and contests, and to provide the results thereof such as success stories and contest winners;
to provide ’email to a friend’ features.

Your Choices About Your Information

Health information that you provide will be displayed in an aggregate and anonymous format. Any comments or reviews you include relating to your medial condition, treatments or other details will be linked to your username unless you choose to display comments anonymously. You may have access to, review, correct, update, change or delete your account profile information and health profile information (including whether or not to display comments or reviews anonymously) at any time. Simply log into your account, go to My HealthProfile and click edit to make the necessary changes or go to My Preferences and make any necessary changes. Members may edit their username, password, email address, comments or reviews (as well as whether such comments are shown anonymously or linked to a username), symptoms and descriptions, treatments and reviews, or causes at any time. However, members may not edit or delete other information provided such as conditions, year of birth, gender, year of diagnosis, and zip code.

You may choose to delete your account by logging in to your account, clicking My Preferences and clicking the ‘delete my account’ option. When you choose to delete your account, your e-mail address will be permanently removed from the Healthetreatment database. However, the demographic, condition-, symptom-, and treatment- specific information that you provided will remain in Healthetreatment database in aggregate form. Comments that were provided by you about symptoms and treatments will remain in the database as anonymous.

If you previously opted to receive newsletters, commercial e-mails or other communications from Healthetreatment or third parties, but subsequently change your mind, you may opt-out by logging in and editing your account profile preferences under My Preferences. If you previously opted not to receive such communications, you may later opt-in by editing your account profile.

Information you post on the Site will be accessed, used, and stored by others around the world, including countries that might not have legislation that guarantees adequate protection with respect to your country of residence.

By providing your information for inclusion in our Site, you acknowledge that you consent to your information being used as described here. While Healthetreatment takes measures to safeguard your information from unauthorized access or inappropriate use by third parties, Healthetreatment does not control these third parties and we are not responsible for their use of information you post or otherwise make available on the Site.

Blogs

Our Web site offers publicly accessible blogs or community forums. You should be aware that any information you provide in these areas may be read, collected, and used by others who access them.

Emails to You

At registration and at various times as a registered Healthetreatment member, you will be given the option of receiving periodic informational emails from Healthetreatment. These emails will not contain personal health information. You may unsubscribe or change any of your email preferences by clicking on the applicable links in the emails you receive from Healthetreatment or by changing your profile under My Preferences on the Site. If you are experiencing difficulties with our automated unsubscribe service, please select the Contact Us link on the Website.

Healthetreatment takes members’ trust seriously, and your data is kept secure using commercially reasonable technical precautions. Protecting your personal information is a shared responsibility, so members are responsible for keeping their passwords and other sensitive information private and secure.

Disclosure of Your Information

We may share your information with third parties who help us in the delivery of our own products and services to you. We disclose information to companies and individuals we employ to perform functions on our behalf. Examples include hosting our web servers, analyzing data, providing marketing assistance, and providing customer service. These companies and individuals may be located in a country whose data protection legislation is different from your country, and they will have access to your personal information as necessary to perform their functions, but they may not share that information with any other third party or use that data for any other purpose. We will remain the data controller and be responsible for any information shared in this way.

We may disclose such information to third parties if you consent to such disclosure. If you indicate by configuring your profile and preferences that you would like to receive information about the offers relevant to your condition or updates on treatments, we may supply your contact information to select third parties for the purpose of sending you e-mail or otherwise communicating with you. We use data we have about you (such as your health information) to determine whether you might be interested in the opportunities, products or services of a particular third party.

We may also share aggregated anonymous information about visitors to the Site with third parties who may use such Healthetreatment data as part of their independent research and analysis. Examples of third parties may include without limitation: colleges and universities engaged in academic research; hospitals or physician practices interested in measuring patient outcomes; or pharmaceutical companies seeking to gain a better understanding of the efficacy of their products. Depending on the circumstances, we may or may not charge third parties for this aggregate information.

We disclose information if legally required to do so, or at our discretion pursuant to a request from a governmental entity or if we believe in good faith ‘ after considering your privacy interests and other factors ‘ that such action is necessary to: (a) conform to legal requirements or comply with legal process; (b) protect our rights or property or our affiliated companies; (c) prevent a crime or protect national security; or (d) protect the personal safety of users or the public. Because Healthetreatment is a US company and information collected on our Site is stored in whole or in part in the United States, your information may become subject to U.S. law.

We may disclose and transfer such information to a third party who acquires any or all of Healthetreatment, whether such acquisition is by way of merger, consolidation or purchase of all or a substantial portion of our assets. In addition, in the event Healthetreatment becomes the subject of an insolvency proceeding, whether voluntary or involuntary, Healthetreatment or its liquidator, administrator, receiver or administrative receiver may sell, license or otherwise dispose of such information in a transaction approved by the court. You will be notified of the sale of all or a substantial portion of our business to a third party by email or through a prominent notice posted on the Site.

Again, in each of these situations, the recipients of your data may potentially be located in any country in the world. If you are a resident in any EU member state, for example, you must be aware that the EU authorities do not generally consider that the regulations of non-EU countries ensure an adequate or equivalent level of protection as compared to the EU data protection regulations.

Disclosure to Linked Sites

For your convenience there are links and references to third party web sites operated by companies that are not affiliated with the Site and that do not have contracts to provide content or services through the Site. Healthetreatment does not disclose your personal health information or other personal information to these third party web sites without obtaining your consent. Healthetreatment does not endorse and is not responsible for the privacy practices of these sites. If you choose to link to or visit one of these third party web sites, you should review the privacy policy posted on this other web site to understand how that third party web site collects and uses your personal information.

Risks and Benefits

Healthetreatment has no way of guaranteeing the validity of the information that members may submit, nor can Healthetreatment authenticate the identity of any member, so any information you review is at your own risk and should be discussed with your doctor, pharmacist or health care provider. There is also the risk of discomfort with sharing health information online. Members are free to stop or opt out of any parts of the Healthetreatment surveys or Site at any time.

Please remember that if you submit any of your personal information in a way that it can be viewed by other members and visitors, such information may be collected and used by others over whom Healthetreatment has no control. We cannot control the use made by third parties of information you post.

Potential benefits of using the Site include gaining a comprehensive overview of available treatments and efficacy, as well as a better understanding of severity of symptoms associated with medical conditions. Our goal is to help patients improve quality of life and make informed treatment decisions, while contributing to a better collective understanding of many health conditions.

Emails You Send to Healthetreatment

This Privacy Policy does not apply to content, business information, ideas, concepts or inventions that you send to Healthetreatment by email. If you want to keep content or business information, ideas, concepts or inventions private or proprietary, do not send them in an email to Healthetreatment. Email is an inherently unsafe format.

Email-A-Friend

When you use the Site’s “Tell a Friend” referral service to tell a friend about the Site, Healthetreatment may ask for and include your name and email address in the subject line of the email to identify you as having made the request to send the email. We will ask you for your friend’s email address. We will automatically send your friend a one-time email inviting him or her to visit the Site and consider sharing health information or becoming a member. We do not store this information.

Children’s Privacy

We are committed to protecting the privacy of children. Neither Healthetreatment nor any of its services are designed or intended to attract children under the age of 13. We do not collect personal information from any person we actually know is under the age of 13.

Security

You are responsible for maintaining the confidentiality of your username, password and account. Furthermore, you are entirely responsible for any and all activities that occur under your account. You agree to immediately notify Healthetreatment of any unauthorized use of your account or any other breach of security known to the member.

Healthetreatment has implemented technical and organizational measures designed to secure your personal information from accidental loss and from unauthorized access, use, alteration or disclosure. Notwithstanding such measures, the Internet is an open system and we cannot guarantee that unauthorized third parties will never be able to defeat those measures or use your personal information for improper purposes.

Listed below are some of the security procedures that Healthetreatment uses to protect your privacy:

Requires both a username (log-in name) and a password in order for users to access their personal information or health information.
Uses firewalls to protect information held in our servers.
Utilizes Secure Socket Layer (SSL) encryption in transmitting personal information and health information to our servers. In order to take advantage of encryption technology, you must have an Internet browser which supports 128-bit encryption.
Closely monitors the limited number of Healthetreatment employees who have potential access to your personal information and health information.
Requires all Healthetreatment employees to abide by our Privacy Policy and to be subject to disciplinary action if they violate it.
Backs-up our systems with a third party service provider to protect the integrity of your personal information and health information.

Despite Healthetreatment’s efforts to protect your personal information and health information, there is always some risk that an unauthorized third party may find a way around our security systems or that transmissions of your information over the Internet may be intercepted.

Your California Rights

A California resident who has provided personal information to a business with whom he/she has established a business relationship for personal, family, or household purposes (‘California customer’) is entitled to request information about whether the business has disclosed personal information to any third parties for the third parties’ direct marketing purposes. In general, if the business has made such a disclosure of personal information, upon receipt of a request by a California customer, the business is required to provide a list of all third parties to whom personal information was disclosed in the preceding calendar year, as well as a list of the categories of personal information that were disclosed.

However, under the law, a business is not required to provide the above-described lists if the business adopts and discloses to the public (in its privacy policy) a policy of not disclosing customer’s personal information to third parties for their direct marketing purposes unless the customer first affirmatively agrees to the disclosure, as long as the business maintains and discloses this policy. Rather, the business may comply with the law by notifying the customer of his or her right to prevent disclosure of personal information and providing a cost free means to exercise that right.

As stated in our Privacy Policy, we do not share information with third parties for their direct marketing purposes unless you affirmatively agree to such disclosure. If you do ask us to share your information with a third party for its marketing purposes, we will only share information in connection with that specific promotion, as we do not share information with any third party on a continual basis. To prevent disclosure of your personal information for use in direct marketing by a third party, do not opt in to such use when you provide personal information on our Site. Please note that whenever you opt in to receive future communications from a third party, your information will be subject to the third party’s privacy policy. If you later decide that you do not want that third party to use your information, you will need to contact the third party directly, as we have no control over how third parties use information. You should always review the privacy policy of any party that collects your information to determine how that entity will handle your information.

California customers may request further information about our compliance with this law by e-mailing mbennett@healthetreatment.com. Please note that we are only required to respond to one request per customer each year, and we are not required to respond to requests made by means other than through this e-mail address.

Changes to this Privacy Policy

If we decide to change the substance of this Privacy Policy, we will post those changes through a prominent notice on the Site so that you will always know what information we gather, how we might use that information, and to whom we will disclose it.

Your continued use of the Site will indicate acceptance of the changes. You may of course choose to opt-out of continuing to use the Site. Please exit the Site immediately if you do not agree to the terms of this Privacy Policy or any revised policy.

Contact Information

If you have questions or comments about this policy, please contact us at:

Privacy Administrator
Healthetreatment
11 Devonshire Rd.
Middleton, MA 01949
mbennett@healthetreatment.com

Last Updated: May 26, 2010