Privacy Policies

When you're seen at Co-Psych, you'll be asked to review a document about privacy of your healthcare information.  This is now a federal requirement under the program you may have heard of as "HIPPA" (technically, that's HIPAA: the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996). 

At Co-Psych privacy is taken seriously, down to the curtains.  Probably the greatest violation of your privacy comes from sitting in the waiting area, but 95% of the time you'll be the only one there.  Usually there's just one patient at a time and often there will be several minutes in between you, so there's a good chance you won't see anybody. 

In general, the policy here is to try to protect you and your healthcare information at every possible step.  It may not be perfect, but we'll be trying, and any gap you can see, please point it out.   For basic information on the confidentiality of psychiatric records, take that link.  And here is more on computer security.  

HIPAA itself offers you some protections, and we'll try to go beyond that.  Basics include not revealing information about you when dealing with insurance companies, except as required by them for payment (and even then, we try to keep it minimal).  Any electronic transfer of information must be encrypted somehow (see email for one exception, at your option).