Patient Rights & Privacy

This notice describes how your medical information may be used and disclosed, and how you can access this information:

• Notice of Health Information Privacy Practices - English

Questions? Please contact us at:

MaineHealth Privacy Office
1 Riverfront Plaza
Westbrook, ME 04092

All MaineHealth patients have the right to:

• Be treated with respect
• Be informed about your care
• Privacy
• Get information about your care in your preferred language
• Make decisions about your care, including accepting or refusing care
• Safe care, free from abuse
• Pain management
• Know the progress and details about your care
• Ask questions
• Access to medical records, as appropriate
• Receive care any time of day, as appropriate
• Be provided information about your rights
• To receive care and services. If our health care team/providers deem additional services or treatments are necessary for your care, you have the right to transfer your care to another hospital.

Learn more about your rights and responsibilities as a MaineHealth patient in The Patient Care Partnership booklet.

If you believe your privacy rights have been violated, you may file a complaint in writing. Please mail it to:

MaineHealth Privacy Office
1 Riverfront Plaza
Westbrook, ME 04092

You may also contact the privacy office at the MaineHealth location where you have a grievance, or contact the Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services. All complaints must be submitted in writing. You will not be penalized for filing a complaint.

Your privacy is important to MaineHealth, including all of our providers, hospitals, practices and organizations. Our website is not designed to appeal to minors. We do not knowingly attempt to solicit or receive any information from children. Following is an outline of the information we do and do not gather from our site visitors.

Types of information we collect

1. Non-personal information via technology, such as information about traffic patterns on our website
2. Personal information that users provide to us when they register, login or submit forms
3. Browsing patterns of devices
4. Browsing patterns of known users

How we collect your information

MaineHealth may use third-party vendor remarketing tracking cookies, including Google AdWords’ tracking cookie. This means we may continue to show ads to you across the internet, specifically on the Google Display Network (GDN).

• As always, we respect your privacy and are not collecting any identifiable information through the use of Google’s or any other third-party remarketing system.
• The third-party vendors, including Google, will place cookies in order to serve ads based on past visits to our website. This allows us to continue to market our services to those who have shown interest in MaineHealth, or any of its organizations. You may opt out of Google's use of cookies by visiting Google's Ads Settings (http://www.google.com/settings/ads).

We use Drupal, Siteimprove, Google Analytics and Google Search Console to collect non-personal aggregated use data. Site visitors may also be asked to provide information, such as an email address, a mailing address, and/or a phone number, and credit card information in order to receive some of our services. Visitors may decide to volunteer this additional information to fill out a survey, to make a donation, to register for a program, or to join a mailing list.

Our content management system uses browsing behavior to recommend relevant content. The recommendations are informational and not meant to provide guidance on the care you should receive.

Use of your information

Non-personal information

• Non-personal information on an aggregated basis may be used make the website more useful to you
• Google may use the data collected to contextualize and personalize the ads of its own advertising network
• Personal data collected: Cookie and usage data
• Place of processing: USA
• Find Google's privacy policy

Correspondence

If you correspond with us via form submission, email, the postal service, or other form of communication, we may retain such correspondence and the information contained therein and use such to respond to your inquiry and/or notify you of our services, upcoming events and research projects.

Personal information

The information we collect is used to provide the services you have requested and may be used to help improve the content of our website. Information collected may be shared with other organizations in the MaineHealth network to provide the services requested.

• Health-related benefits and services: We may send you information that is related to your health care needs. This information will inform you about activities or services that may be of interest to you such as upcoming events, follow-up checks or thank you notes, appointment reminders and health education opportunities including pre-operative, discharge, or other educational instructions.
• Fundraising activities: We may share information such as your address or phone number. Our foundation may use this information to contact you about raising funds. In these instances, we only would release contact information to our foundation, such as your name, address and phone number.

Use of artificial intelligence

MaineHealth does not use artificial intelligence (AI) or automated decision-making technologies on MaineHealth.org or its microsites, including annual report sites. All content, responses and interactions on our website are created and managed by MaineHealth staff or approved representatives. If this policy changes in the future, we will update this privacy statement accordingly.

Third Party Affiliated Sites

We require third party affiliated partner sites to certify in writing that they have implemented the same level of federal and applicable state privacy and security compliance as MaineHealth. This approach ensures that all personally identifiable information (PII) and Protected Health Information (PHI) is treated with the same standards of privacy and security, regardless of where such data is processed.

For the purposes of this policy, "third party affiliated sites" shall refer to any website or web service with which MaineHealth has executed a written agreement to provide website or content delivery services and/or to permit the linkage of MaineHealth's website to the third party website. This policy exclusively covers the privacy practices of MaineHealth.org and its contractual relationships with third party websites and services.  MaineHealth recognizes that certain third party public and private websites and web services may link to MaineHealth’s website as a public service and for which MaineHealth does not have the ability to influence or dictate compliance with applicable federal and state privacy and security requirements.

Security

We have a secure computer room in place in our physical facilities to protect against the loss, misuse or alteration of information that we have collected from you at our site. However, we cannot guarantee the security of your computing environment.

Please be sure to use a secure computer and network connection when you transmit information to us. If you feel that this site is not following its stated Website Privacy Policy, you may contact the state or local chapters of the Better Business Bureau, the state or local consumer protection office, the Federal Trade Commission by phone at (202) FTC-HELP (202-382-4357) or online at https://reportfraud.ftc.gov/.

Where MaineHealth partners with a third party to provide website or content delivery services directly to site visitors at that third party, the privacy practices published at the third party will apply to any information provided. Please refer to those third party sites for their privacy policies.

MaineHealth is active on multiple social media channels. If you are interested in participating, please join the conversation. Open discussions are welcome and we look forward to any comments, stories and experiences you want to share. However, before you post, please read the following guidelines.

Guidelines for participation

We encourage social media conversations with or about MaineHealth. You are welcome to comment, and share your experiences. We make reasonable efforts to monitor participation to ensure that participants stay on topic, are courteous and refrain from offensive comments. Information posted on any of our social media channels is not medical advice and under no circumstances does it replace a consultation with a health care professional.

Opinions and/or views expressed on MaineHealth social media channels represent the thoughts of the individual commenters, and not those of MaineHealth nor our system organizations. MaineHealth reserves the sole right to review, edit and/or delete any comments. Comments including, but not limited to, the following may be deleted or edited by the administrators:

• Comments that violate the privacy of our patients and their families;
• Abusive or hurtful comments;
• Off-topic and redundant comments (this includes promotion of events, groups, pages, web sites, organizations and programs not related to or affiliated with MaineHealth);
• Comments that use foul language or "hate speech" (racial-, ethnic- or gender-bashing language);
• Personal attacks or defamatory comments (i.e., making negative personal comments about a fellow commenter, instead of just expressing a difference of opinion);
• Content that violates copyright or other law, or that may be confidential.
• Health care advice or medical information that has not been vetted by MaineHealth or another recognized medical authority. 

Do not disclose personal health information online

• All web sites linked to or from MaineHealth system social media sites are provided as a service to readers. Such linkage does not constitute endorsement of those sites by MaineHealth. We are not responsible for the content of external websites.
• By submitting content to any of the MaineHealth system social media sites, you understand and acknowledge that this information is available to the public, and that MaineHealth may use this information for internal and external activities, including promotions and fundraising.
• By posting your own content to any of these sites or pages, you are allowing other users to access, view and potentially alter and/or repost your content.  
• MaineHealth has no control over how others use the information you have made available on our social media channels. If you do not wish your information to be published, copied and/or reprinted, please do not post it.
• Please exercise caution when posting medical information and do not disclose personal identifiable information such as your location, medical record number and financial information.
• This includes in private or direct messages.