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 the Med-IQ’s
web sites, please contact Judy V. Lum,
at jlum@med-iq.com (443) 543-5200.
Revision date: October 22, 2007
