Privacy Policy

Introduction

This Privacy Policy tells you, our patient, how your personal information (which includes your health information) is collected and used within our practice, and the circumstances in which we may share it with third parties. If you apply for a role with us, the section Job applicants, near the end of this policy, explains how we handle your application.

Advanced Chiropractic is a trading name of Chiropractic Art Pty Ltd, which operates the practice at 869 Springvale Road, Mulgrave VIC 3170. We handle personal information in line with the Privacy Act 1988 (Cth), the Australian Privacy Principles and the Health Records Act 2001 (Vic).

Why and when your consent is necessary

When you register as a patient of our practice, you give consent for the practitioner and practice staff at Advanced Chiropractic to access and use your personal information so they can provide you with care. Only staff who need to see your personal information have access to it. If we need to use your information for anything else, we will ask for your consent first.

Why do we collect, use, hold and share your personal information?

Our practice needs to collect your personal information to provide healthcare services to you. Our main purpose for collecting, using, holding and sharing your personal information is to manage your health. We also use it for directly related business activities, such as claims and payments, practice audits and accreditation, and business processes such as staff training.

What personal information do we collect?

The information we collect about you includes your:

• name, date of birth, address and contact details
• health information, including health history, medications, allergies, adverse events, immunisations, social history, family history and risk factors
• Medicare number, where available, for identification and claiming purposes
• healthcare identifiers
• health fund details
• your answers to our patient outcomes survey, described below

Dealing with us anonymously

You have the right to deal with us anonymously or under a pseudonym, unless it is impracticable for us to do so or we are required or authorised by law to deal only with identified individuals.

How do we collect your personal information?

Our practice may collect your personal information in several different ways.

• When you make your first appointment, our practice staff collect your personal and demographic information through your registration. Appointments are booked through our online booking system, PracSuite, or by phone.
• During the course of providing care we may collect further personal information, including a patient intake form and a patient consent form, both of which are sent to you before your first consultation.
• We may also collect your personal information when you visit our website, send us an email or SMS, telephone us, book online, or contact us through social media.
• When you complete our patient outcomes survey on your phone, as described in the next section.

In some circumstances, personal information may be collected from other sources, usually because it is not practical or reasonable to collect it from you directly. This may include information from:

• your guardian or responsible person
• other healthcare providers involved in your care, such as specialists, allied health practitioners, hospitals, community health services, and pathology and diagnostic imaging services
• your health fund, Medicare, or the Department of Veterans’ Affairs, as necessary

Our patient outcomes survey

We invite patients to complete a short survey. Your answers about your neck, back and posture help your chiropractor follow your readings over time and plan your care. The general wellbeing questions give a fuller picture of how you are going overall. We also use your answers to hear your feedback and, as described below, to decide whether to invite you to review us on Google.

The survey is optional, and choosing not to complete it does not affect your care. Once you start, each question needs an answer before you can send it, and you can stop at any time. The details you enter on the first screen are saved when you press Continue. Your answers are saved only when you send the last page.

How you receive it

We send you the survey link by SMS the day after your first visit, and by email before your review appointments. PracSuite, our practice management system, sends these messages. The link contains your first name, surname and client number so the survey can find your record. Anyone you forward the message to can see these details, and they can also appear in your browser history and in the technical logs of the services that deliver the survey. Our staff may also send you a personal link, and a QR code at our front desk opens the same survey.

What the survey collects

• your name, date of birth and client number
• if you use the QR code at the front desk, your email address, which helps us match you to your record, and, if you choose to give it, your mobile number
• the concerns you describe in your own words, how bad each one is at the moment, how much it affects your daily life, what it is stopping you doing, and where you would like it to be
• your own ratings from 0 to 10 of your neck, mid back, lower back and posture, and of some general wellbeing questions: energy levels, ability to handle stress, quality of sleep, immune system, mental state and emotional state
• on later surveys, any positive changes you have made for your health and any negative events (physical, chemical or emotional) since your last review, whether you want to keep working with us, how often you feel you should be adjusted, anything else you would like to mention, a star rating of your experience with us and, below the top rating, what would have made it a 5
• the name of anyone you tell us you would refer to us (this question is optional)

The wellbeing questions are there to understand how you are going overall. Chiropractic care is not a treatment for immune, mental or emotional health conditions. Your answers are health information, which is sensitive information under the Privacy Act.

If the details you enter do not match our records, we keep a coded form of your device’s internet (IP) address for a short period, usually a day or two, to stop repeated attempts. Like most online services, our providers’ systems also record internet addresses in their technical logs for a limited period.

Where your answers are stored and who can see them

Your answers are stored by Supabase, a database service, in its Sydney, Australia region, which runs on Amazon Web Services (AWS) data centres. Your chiropractor and our staff can see them. The survey system is shared with Aura Chiropractic in Toorak, which Dr Arthur Kaganovitch also runs, but staff at each clinic can see only that clinic’s patients’ answers.

Supabase is a United States company. Its staff and some of its providers work from other countries, including the United States and Singapore, and may access the stored answers when they support or secure the service. Your answers also pass through Cloudflare, a United States network provider that Supabase uses to carry the connection between your phone and the database. Supabase publishes the current list of providers it uses on its website.

Referrals and Google reviews

If you name someone you would refer to us, we keep that name only as part of your survey answers, and we do not contact that person.

At the end of a later survey, if you give us the top star rating, you are invited to share your experience on Google. Leaving a review is up to you and does not affect your care. If you choose to, you leave our survey for Google’s website, where Google’s privacy policy applies. Your review is public and shows your Google name, so others will be able to see that you are our patient.

How long we keep your answers

We keep your survey answers as part of your health record, for as long as we keep the rest of it: under Victorian law, at least seven years after your last visit or, for a patient under 18, until they turn 25.

Children

If the patient is a child, we usually expect a parent or guardian to complete the survey with them or for them, and the answers form part of the child’s record.

Seeing or correcting your answers

You can ask to see or correct your survey answers in the same way as the rest of your record, as set out below. You cannot change a survey once you have sent it, but if something in it is wrong, tell us and we will record the correction.

When, why and with whom do we share your personal information?

We sometimes share your personal information:

• with third parties who work with our practice for business purposes, such as accreditation agencies or information technology providers. These third parties are required to comply with the Australian Privacy Principles and with this policy.
• with other healthcare providers
• when it is required or authorised by law, for example a court subpoena
• when it is necessary to lessen or prevent a serious threat to a patient’s life, health or safety, or to public health or safety, and it is impractical to obtain the patient’s consent
• to assist in locating a missing person
• to establish, exercise or defend an equitable claim
• for the purpose of a confidential dispute resolution process
• when there is a statutory requirement to share certain personal information

Only people who need to access your information are able to do so. Other than in the course of providing care or as otherwise described in this policy, our practice will not share personal information with any third party without your consent.

Our survey provider, Supabase, may access survey answers from overseas to support or secure the service, as described above. The answers are stored in Sydney, and Supabase’s data processing terms, which form part of its terms of service, require it to limit access to staff who need it and to keep the information confidential. Apart from this, we will not share your personal information with anyone outside Australia without your consent, unless under exceptional circumstances that are permitted by law.

Our practice will not use your personal information to market our services directly to you without your express consent. If you do consent, you may opt out of direct marketing at any time by telling us in writing. Apart from the Google review invitation described above, we do not use your survey answers for marketing, and we do not contact anyone you name in the survey.

Our practice may use your personal information to improve the quality of the services we offer, through research and analysis of our patient data. We may provide de-identified data to other organisations to improve population health outcomes. That information is secure, patients cannot be identified from it, and it is stored within Australia. You can tell our reception staff or email us at info@advancedchiropractic.com.au if you do not want your information included.

How do we store and protect your personal information?

Your personal information may be held at our practice in several forms. These include:

• electronic patient records
• paper patient records
• visual records, including X-rays, CT scans, MRI, ultrasound and photographs

As part of our commitment to the confidentiality of the information in your record, strict storage policies are observed in this practice. All reasonable steps are taken to prevent unlawful interference with your electronic records, which are accessible only to staff of this practice and are protected by a password.

Paper and visual records are uploaded to your digital record, and the physical copies are stored in locked cabinets inside the clinic that only registered practitioners in the practice can open. In every form of record storage, each member of staff understands the principles and the importance of practitioner and patient confidentiality.

How can you access and correct your personal information?

You have the right to request access to, and correction of, your personal information. Our practice acknowledges that patients may request access to their records.

All requests should be made in writing, either by:

• email to info@advancedchiropractic.com.au; or
• letter addressed to Advanced Chiropractic, 869 Springvale Road, Mulgrave VIC 3170, Australia, marked PRIVATE and CONFIDENTIAL.

On receipt, our practice will respond within 30 days by your chosen method.

Our practice will take reasonable steps to correct your personal information where it is not accurate or up to date. From time to time we will ask you to confirm that the personal information our practice holds is correct and current.

How can you lodge a privacy-related complaint?

We take complaints and concerns about privacy seriously. Please put any privacy concern in writing, by email to info@advancedchiropractic.com.au or by letter addressed to Advanced Chiropractic, 869 Springvale Road, Mulgrave VIC 3170, Australia, marked PRIVATE and CONFIDENTIAL. We will then attempt to resolve it in line with our resolution procedure, and will respond within 30 days.

You may also contact the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner (OAIC). Generally, the OAIC will require you to give us time to respond before it will investigate. For more information visit oaic.gov.au or call 1300 363 992. If you are not satisfied with our response to your privacy complaint, you may lodge a written complaint with the OAIC.

Because your complaint may concern health information, you may also contact the Health Complaints Commissioner in Victoria, which handles complaints under the Health Records Act 2001 (Vic). For more information visit hcc.vic.gov.au or call 1300 582 113.

Privacy and our website

For each visitor to the site we collect, through cookies and through our contact and booking forms, information that does not identify you personally. This includes browser type, version and language, operating system, pages viewed while browsing the site, page access times, and the referring website address. We use this information internally to understand visitor traffic and trends, and to improve the site.

The third-party services that support the website are:

• our web host, which stores the website files and serves the pages you request
• Google Tag Manager and Google Analytics, which measure how the site is used. You can opt out of Google Analytics using Google’s browser add-on.
• PracSuite, our practice management and online booking system, which holds the appointment and patient records described above and stores them in Australia

From time to time we may use information for new purposes not described in this policy. If our information practices change, the new purposes will apply only to data collected from the date of the change forward.

Job applicants

This section applies if you apply for a role at our practice, whether or not a role is advertised. Our careers page describes the steps. The rest of this policy is about our patients, and it also applies to you if you are, or become, a patient of the practice.

What we collect, and why

We collect what you send us when you apply: your messages, a video or written note, your CV, your AHPRA registration number or expected registration date, your Working with Children Check and proof of professional indemnity insurance if you already hold them, and the names and contact details of your referees. We also collect what we learn from the public register of practitioners, from your referees, and from the phone call, interviews, clinic visits and time in clinic described on the careers page. After a conditional offer, we ask you for a national police check as a condition of starting.

We use this information only to consider you for a role at our practice and, if you are successful, to set up your engagement with us. By sending us your application you agree to us collecting and holding it for those purposes. You do not have to send everything we ask for, but if you choose not to, we may not be able to take your application further. A national police check contains criminal record information, which is sensitive information under the Privacy Act. We ask for one only after a conditional offer. You obtain it and give it to us yourself, and by giving it to us you agree to us holding it for this purpose. We look at it only for anything relevant to the role. If you choose not to provide it, we cannot complete the offer.

Who sees your application

Your application is seen by the principal chiropractor, Dr Arthur Kaganovitch, and the staff who help with recruitment. To prepare an offer we may use an adviser, such as our accountant or a workplace relations adviser, who sees only what they need for that. We confirm your registration on the public register kept by AHPRA and speak to the referees you name, with their permission. We do not otherwise share your application unless you agree or the law requires it.

Where it is held

Our email, including anything you attach, runs on Google Workspace. Google stores it for us outside Australia, including in the United States, under a contract that limits Google to providing that service, and we remain responsible for it under this policy. Messages you send us on Instagram go to Meta before they reach us. Meta holds its own copy outside Australia under its own terms and privacy policy, and we cannot hold Meta to the Australian Privacy Principles for that copy. If you would rather Meta did not hold your messages, apply by email. We do not otherwise send your application overseas.

How long we keep it

If you are not successful, we delete our copies of your application, including your messages, your CV and any video or link you sent, within twelve months of telling you the outcome, unless you ask us to keep it for future roles. If you do, we keep it for up to twelve months from your request, then delete it or ask you again. We can delete only what we hold: messages you sent on Instagram stay in your own account, and with Meta under its terms, and a video hosted on your own account stays there. A police check is destroyed once the decision it was obtained for has been made. We keep only a note that it was sighted, and the date. If you join us, the rest of your application becomes part of our record of your engagement with us, which this policy continues to cover.

If you choose the treatment swap

On the clinic visit you can choose the treatment swap described on the careers page, in which you and the principal chiropractor examine and, where the examination calls for it, adjust each other, your half only if you are registered and insured. When you are the one being examined, you are a patient of the practice for that visit: you complete our patient consent form first, and the notes go into our patient records, covered by the rest of this policy. They are kept for as long as health records law requires and held apart from your application, and what is found about your own health plays no part in the decision about the role. What we see of how you examine and adjust is part of your application.

Seeing, correcting or complaining

You can ask to see or correct what we hold about your application, or make a privacy complaint, in the ways set out above under “How can you access and correct your personal information?” and “How can you lodge a privacy-related complaint?”. We respond within 30 days, and you can also take a complaint to the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner.

Policy review statement

Advanced Chiropractic may amend this Privacy Policy at any time. If you object to this Privacy Policy, you should not use the site or engage the services of Advanced Chiropractic.

This Privacy Policy is reviewed regularly so that it stays in line with any changes that occur, both internally and with external providers, government agencies and the law. Where this policy changes, the date at the top of this page is updated.

Contact us

Advanced Chiropractic
Dr Arthur Kaganovitch, Chiropractor
869 Springvale Road, Mulgrave VIC 3170
Email: info@advancedchiropractic.com.au
Phone: (03) 9548 5050