This practice has established safety measures to protect your privacy and confidentiality. Your confidential clinical notes will not be shared outside of the practice, without your written consent.

Confidentiality

Everyone is entitled to confidentiality. The federal law, Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) strictly forbids disclosure of health information without the expressed consent of the patient. In the event you are a danger of causing physical harm to yourself or another, this practice will be obligated by law to inform the relevant authority to reduce and/or prevent such harm from taking place.

Privacy

The Health Information Privacy applies to most health care practitioners and its regulation, known as the Privacy Rule, sets detailed rules regarding privacy, access and disclosure of information.

• Patients are able to see and obtain copies of their medical records and request corrections if they find mistakes.

• Anyone legally authorized to make healthcare decisions for a person lacking such capacity has the same right of access to the person's personal medical information.

• Health care practitioners should routinely disclose their practices regarding privacy of personal medical information.

• Health care practitioners may share the person’s medical information, but only among themselves and only as much as is necessary to provide medical care.

• Personal medical information may not be disclosed for marketing purposes.

• Health care practitioners should take reasonable precautions to ensure that their communications with the person are confidential. 

• Patients may file complaints about privacy practices of health care practitioners (directly to the health care practitioner or to the Office for Civil Rights in the United States Department of Health and Human Services―see How To File a Complaint with the Office for Civil Rights).

Website Privacy Policy

(a) When you visit our website 

When you come to our website (www.arealewellnessandcounseling.com) we may collect certain information such as browser type, operating system, website visited immediately before coming to our site, etc. This information is used in an aggregated manner to analyse how people use our site, such that we can improve our service. 

(b) Cookies 

We may from time to time use cookies on our website. Cookies are very small files which a website uses to identify you when you come back to the site and to store details about your use of the site. Cookies are not malicious programs that access or damage your computer. Most web browsers automatically accept cookies but you can choose to reject cookies by changing your browser settings. However, this may prevent you from taking full advantage of our website. Our website may from time to time use cookies to analyze website traffic and help us provide a better website visitor experience. In addition, cookies may be used to serve relevant ads to website visitors through third party services such as Google Adwords. These ads may appear on this website or other websites you visit. 

(c) Third party sites 

Our site may from time to time have links to other websites not owned or controlled by us. These links are meant for your convenience only. Links to third party websites do not constitute sponsorship or endorsement or approval of these websites. Please be aware that Areale Wellness and Counseling is not responsible for the privacy practices of other such websites. We encourage our users to be aware, when they leave our website, to read the privacy statements of each and every website that collects personal identifiable information.