HIPAA

EyeXcel is not just a place to purchase glasses and contacts, but a medical facility that helps patients every day. We are a medical practice responsible for obtaining the appropriate information necessary to treat our patients. Our doctors and staff take that responsibility very seriously, and have been long before the initiatives for protecting private personal and health information, HIPAA, existed. We respect our obligation to keep private and health information private. Our staff and doctors only collect the information needed to complete our respective tasks.

Examples of personal information that we collect are phone numbers, your address, and email. This is to insure that we can contact you or send you information through the appropriate channel. We also collect your date of birth and social security number. If we need to contact your insurance company, this information is needed to verify your identity for us to correspond with them. Many insurance plans, for example, Medicare, uses your social security number as your insurance ID, which means we need it for that reason as well. Those are just a few examples of information we collect.

At EyeXcel, we don’t collect information that is absolutely necessary. For example, even though we have the capability to store credit card information on file, our office policy does not allow that information to be saved. Our office operates on electronic records, and all of our patients’ health data is stored appropriately. Even though our database is encrypted and our firewall into our network is strong, we simply don’t take the risk of storing credit card information. We know that by only storing health information and not storing financial information, we stay at a low risk for hackers trying to steal information.

When coming to our office, we have all our patients sign a disclosure form giving us permission to perform certain tasks using private information. Some examples of how we use information would be to obtain your medical and vision benefits, file your claim to your insurance, calling in a prescription to your pharmacy, or contacting a primary care physician to collect or send medical records.

The above file is the “Notice of Privacy Practices”. This outlines our statement of HIPAA compliance. If you are not able to print this from the file on this website, one will be provided to you at your request when you come for your appointment. If any other information is needed or any of our policies need to be explained, please ask for the administrator and we will be happy to oblige in any way that we can.