Health Care Operation: We may use and disclose PHI in performing business activities, which are called health care operations. Health care operations include doing things that allow us to improve the quality or care we provide and to reduce health care costs. We may use and disclose PHI about you in the following health care operations:

• Reviewing and improving the quality, efficiency and cost of care that we provide to our patients. For example, we may use PHI about you to develop ways to assist our physicians and staff in deciding how we can improve the medical treatment we provide to others.
• Improving health care and lowering cost for groups of people who have similar health problems and helping to manage and coordinate the care for these groups of people. We may use PHI to identify groups of people with similar health problems to give them information, for instance, about treatment alternatives, and educational classes.
• Reviewing and evaluating the skills, qualifications, and performance of health care providers taking care of you and our other patients.
• Providing training programs for students, trainees, health care providers, or non-health care professionals (for example, billing personnel) to help them practice and improve their skills.
• Cooperating with outside organizations that assess the quality of the care that we provide.
• Cooperating with outside organizations that evaluate, certify, or license health care providers or staff in a particular field or specialty. For example, we may use or disclose PHI so that one of our nurses may become certified as having expertise in a specific field of nursing.
• Cooperating with various people who review our activities. For example, PHI may be seen by doctors reviewing the services provided to you, and by accountants, lawyers, and others who assist us in complying with the law and managing our business.
• Assisting us in making plans for our practice’s future operations.
• Resolving grievances within our practice.
• Reviewing our activities and using or disclosing PHI in the event that we sell our practice to someone else or combine with another practice.
• Business planning and development, such as cost management analyses.
• Business management and general administrative activities in our practice, including managing our activities related to complying with HIPAA Privacy Rule and other legal requirements.
• Creating “de-identified” information that is not identifiable to any individual.

If another health care provider, company or health plan that is required to comply with the HIPAA Privacy Rule has or once had a relationship with you, we may disclose PHI about you for certain health care operations of that health care provider or company. For example, such health operations may include; reviewing and improving the quality, efficiency and cost of care provided to you; reviewing and evaluating the skills, qualifications, and performance of health care providers, or non health care professionals; cooperating with outside organizations that evaluate, certify, or license health care providers or staff in a particular field or specialty; and assisting with legal compliance activities of that health care provider or company.
We may also disclose PHI for the health care operations of an “organized health care arrangement” in which we participate. An example of an “organized health care arrangement” is the joint care provided by a hospital and the doctors who see patients at the hospital.

Communication From Our Office: We may contact you to remind you of appointments and to provide you with information about treatment alternatives or other health related benefits and services that may be of interest to you.

OTHER USES AND DISCLOSURES WE CAN MAKE WITHOUT YOUR WRITTEN AUTHORIZATION

Uses and Disclosures For Which You Have The Opportunity to Agree or Object We may use and disclose PHI about you in some situations where you have the opportunity to agree or object to certain uses and disclosures of PHI about you. If you do not object, then we may make these types of uses and disclosures of PHI.