Doctors on Nicholson Email Policy
Last updated: 16/6/21
At Doctors On Nicholson email communication with patients, other healthcare providers and third parties is undertaken.
Patient’s personal information may be used or disclosed for the following:
- Administrative purposes in the operation of our general practice.
- Billing purposes, including compliance with Medicare requirements.
- Disclosure to others involved in your health care, including treating doctors and specialists outside this medical practice. This may occur through referral to other doctors, or for medical tests and in the reports or results returned to us following the referrals.
- Accreditation and quality assurance activities to improve individual and community health care and practice management.
- For legal related disclosure as required by a court of law.
- For the purposes of research only where de-identified information is used.
- To allow medical students and staff to participate in medical training/teaching using only de-identified information.
- To comply with any legislative or regulatory requirements, e.g. notifiable diseases.
- For use when seeking treatment by other doctors in this practice.
- Reminders and recalls
- Email correspondence when appropriate
Patients
Consent to correspond with patients via email is gathered using the practice’s New Patient Registration Form within the practice or via the HotDoc online patient registration form. Our practice’s privacy policy specifically details the use of email correspondence at Doctors On Nicholson. This privacy policy is on display at reception and available via our website.
Our emails to patients with PDFs or documents attached to emails will be password protected with a password generated by the practice specific to each patient.
Reception and clinical staff are to use three approved identifiers to verify patient details when uploading any documents in patient files or sending emails to patients and external healthcare providers.
External Healthcare Providers
Practice staff are to confirm external healthcare provider contact emails are correct prior to sending any email correspondence.
Fax is the preferred method of communicating with external healthcare providers. When other electronic forms of communication such as Argus, Medical Objects etc. cannot be used and fax is unavailable Doctors on Nicholson will password protect all relevant documents and send via email.