Privacy Policy

This policy explains what Spine Treatment Centers does with information you give us through this website — including the booking form — and what the site collects automatically while you browse.

Some of what you tell us here is health information, and the moment it reaches us it is protected by the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA). How we handle health information once you are a patient of the practice, and the rights HIPAA gives you over it, are set out in our Notice of Privacy Practices. That is a separate document, and it governs if the two ever disagree.

Spine Treatment Centers is the trading name of Southwestern Ohio Disability Associates, LLC, 4050 Executive Park Drive, Suite 110, Cincinnati, Ohio 45241.

What you tell us

When you request a complimentary consultation, we ask for:

We never ask for a Social Security Number, anywhere on this site.

If you leave the form before finishing, we may still hold what you entered up to that point, and may email you a link to complete it. See “Your rights” to stop that.

What the site collects by itself

Standard web-server information: IP address, browser and device type, pages visited, and the date and time. If you arrive from an advertisement or a link we have shared, the address carries campaign tags that tell us which advertisement or page you came from. Those tags describe the advertisement, not you.

• To call you back and arrange your complimentary consultation.
• To check what your insurance covers before your visit. Booking does not wait on this.
• To provide care, and to keep the records a medical practice is required to keep.
• To bill your plan, Ohio BWC, or you.
• To send you appointment confirmations and reminders.
• To remind you to finish a booking you started.
• To understand which advertisements and pages bring people to us — in aggregate, by campaign, not by person.
• To meet our legal and professional obligations.

You consent to the first five when you tick the contact box on the form. You can withdraw that consent at any time; see “Your rights”.

We do not sell your information, and we never will. We do not share it with advertisers or data brokers.

We do not sell your information. We do not give it to advertisers or data brokers. We do not pass patients on to anyone else. Your care stays with this practice.

What follows is the complete list of where your information does go, and why each one is unavoidable.

• Your insurer, Medicaid plan, or Ohio BWC, to verify coverage and to be paid for your care.
• Other providers involved in your care, where that is needed to treat you.
• When the law requires it — a court order, a public-health or safety obligation, or a legally mandated report.

Anything beyond this needs your written authorisation, and you can take that authorisation back at any time.

We advertise, and we want to know which advertisements work. We do that with campaign tags in the web address — they tell us an enquiry came from a particular advertisement. They say nothing about your health.

We do not run advertising trackers on the pages where you tell us about your health.

We keep your information for as long as necessary to fulfill the purposes outlined in this privacy notice unless otherwise required by law.

We will only keep your personal information for as long as it is necessary for the purposes set out in this privacy notice, unless a longer retention period is required or permitted by law (such as tax, accounting, or other legal requirements). No purpose in this notice will require us keeping your personal information for longer than 1 year.

When we have no ongoing legitimate business need to process your personal information, we will either delete or anonymize such information, or, if this is not possible (for example, because your personal information has been stored in backup archives), then we will securely store your personal information and isolate it from any further processing until deletion is possible.

We treat patients under 18, and the booking form is open to them — being under 18 does not stop an application.

Where the patient is under 18, a parent or guardian should complete the form and will be the person we call. A parent or guardian generally holds that patient’s privacy rights, with the exceptions Ohio law makes for certain kinds of care.

You can:

• Ask what we hold about you, and get a copy.
• Have it corrected if it is wrong.
• Ask us to stop contacting you, or to withdraw the consent you gave on the form. Reply to any message, or call us.
• Ask us to delete an enquiry that did not become a course of care.
• Ask us to contact you a particular way — a different number, or only by email.
• Ask who we have disclosed your information to.
• Complain, to us or to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Office for Civil Rights. We will not treat you differently for complaining.

To use any of these, call (513) 241-4230 or email info@spinetreatmentcenters.org.

Once you are a patient, these rights come from HIPAA and the Notice of Privacy Practices sets them out in full, including the limits — records we are required to keep cannot simply be deleted on request.

The booking form, the lead records and the appointment calendar all run on services operating under a Business Associate Agreement with us. Information is encrypted in transit and at rest, and access is limited to staff who need it to do their job.

No system is perfectly secure, and we will not pretend otherwise. If a breach affects your information, we will notify you as the law requires.

If we change this policy we will post the new version here with a new date at the top. If a change materially affects how we use information we already hold, we will tell you directly.

To complain to a regulator: U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Office for Civil Rights.