Our Privacy Policy
The HealthPlus Privacy Policy informs you of our commitment to your privacy regarding our Private Health Services Plan (PHSP) service. At HealthPlus we are committed to respecting and protecting the confidentiality of our clients’ personal information and safeguarding all personal information entrusted to us. Protecting our clients’ privacy and the confidentiality of their personal information is an important aspect of the Company’s operations. Our goal is to provide our clients with the best personal service possible. That includes treating our clients’ personal information appropriately in accordance with this Privacy Policy. Our team of employees rigorously follows our comprehensive privacy policies and security practices in compliance with laws and regulations endeavoring always to act with integrity in everything we do.
1. Why Do We Need Your Information?
Dealing with your confidential personal health and dental plan information is essential to our very operations at HealthPlus. As is the nature of a Private Health Services Plan (PHSP), we collect and store information about you and your claims for health and dental coverage. We need this information about your medical benefits for four reasons:
- to ensure you are eligible for health and dental coverage
- to adjudicate your medical coverage claims in accordance with the Income Tax Act
- to record the financial details of the PHSP transactions
- to retain any tax related information regarding the medical benefits for reporting purposes
2. What Do We Collect?
We limit the information we collect to what we need for the provision of our health and dental plan services and we use it only for that purpose. We obtain most of our information about you and your employees directly from you. As the plan holder and administrator of the Private Health Services Plan (PHSP) and acting as an employer providing benefits to your employee you are permitted to release this employee information. We do not collect additional personal information about you or your employees from any other third parties, specifically regarding health and dental plans. We do not monitor or record your telephone discussions with our representatives with the temporary exception of optional voice mail or email messages you may choose to leave whether it is about HealthPlus or other unrelated information.
3. What Do We Share?
We do not share your personal information with anyone. Specifically, we do not share your contact information including phone number or email with any third parties. The only exception to this commitment is to Government of Canada regulatory bodies where we are required to do so by law, and only by written request for such information.
4. How Do We Store and Handle Your Information?
In the past, original receipts of all health expenses were required. This requirement has recently been eliminated. Effective November 2016, HealthPlus now stores all information about your health & dental plan design, employee claim forms, and medical coverage receipts in electronic format through our WebPortal
All paper based information received at our office about your health & dental plan design, claims, and medical coverage receipts are scanned and stored electronically. After being scanned, all paper based information is securely shredded and destroyed. We currently subcontract the destruction of records to Shred it Secure on site shredding.
We retain your corporate financial information in electronic format for the plan holder year-end tax reporting purposes. We retain information about your health & dental plan design, claims, and coverage receipts in electronic format for your direct enquiries about status. The length of time we store this information depends on regulatory requirements. This period may extend beyond the time you are a customer of HealthPlus. We will only store it for as long as it is legally necessary for make HealthPlus information available to regulatory bodies. This is currently seven (7) years. All employees and functionaries of HealthPlus are familiar with this policy and follow procedures to safeguard your privacy.
5. Our Website
When you go to our website and read pages, or move from page to page, or download content onto your computer, we do not record your personal identity in any way. We do, however, make use of Internet cookies to track the sequence and duration of which pages are viewed on our website. Our Internet cookie is a small, non-intrusive file stored on the computer connected to our website. The purpose of these tracking cookies is to improve page sequence design and page content of our website. While you may view this as surreptitious marketing, our intention is simply to maximize the value of the website to our other potential customers. We believe our service is sufficiently beneficial to our customers that we do not need to resort to any form of deceitful or misleading marketing. All information collected as a result of these Internet cookies is aggregated into a statistical data, and no information specifically about you will be kept or used as a result of visiting our website.
Our website does have the capability of receiving information from new customers who are registering for the first time for HealthPlus as well as submissions of health and dental plan claims from existing customers registered with HealthPlus through our online portal. This information includes your corporate contact and financial information as well as your medical, health & dental plan provisions, claims, and medical coverage receipts. We have established current industry-standard protection around this information on our server.
6. Email
Email sent over the Internet is not encrypted and can be intercepted. HealthPlus will not request that you transmit via email any confidential information regarding your health & dental plan provisions, claims, and coverage receipts. However, if you explicitly ask and agree to receive information by email we will comply, and if you choose to send personal information to us by email we will accept and respond to it. We recommend caution when sending email messages to us and that you do not include confidential information in those messages.
When you send us an email or when you ask us to respond to you by email, we learn your exact email address and any information you have included in the email. In accordance with Canada’s anti-spam legislation we will only use your email address to acknowledge your comments and/or reply to your questions. We will store your communication and our reply in case we correspond further. If you are not a customer, we will not use your email address to solicit your potential business after an unsolicited inquiry. Furthermore, we will not sell your email address to anyone, nor allow any third parties to have access to your email address or other contact information for any reason whatsoever. If you are an existing customer, we will use your email address to send you reminder notices about your year end and to send notifications of the dispatch of any reimbursement payments. If you don’t want us to contact you by email, you may tell us so at any time.
7. Contact
If you have any concerns, please contact our Privacy Officer by email or write to us at
Privacy Officer
HealthPlus
1050 Morrison Dr. 3rd Floor
Ottawa, Ont
K2H8K7
