We promise that healthPiper will always be welcoming, trustworthy, and straightforward. We guard your health information with the same vigilance as we guard our own. And we put our commitments into legally-binding writing.
Healthcare Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA)
Healthcare information is protected by the Federal HIPAA Privacy Rule, which places requirements on the protection of healthcare information and requires that patients be informed of how their health information may be used and protected.
How information may be used and disclosed
HIPAA: An entity must describe how it may use and disclose protected health information about an individual.
healthPiper: We don’t “use” your protected health information, except to provide you treatment. And we won’t ever “disclose” it, except as part of providing treatment. For example, if we transmit a prescription for you to a pharmacy, we will convey to the pharmacy your name, the drug you are being prescribed, and related information such as whether you have allergies. But we only provide the information required to transmit the prescription—nothing more.
Of course, if you want us to send your records to someone, like one of your doctors, and you sign a release of information, we are happy to send them.
Since we are designed to be used without insurance, we don’t share information about you with any insurance company. If you don’t want insurance companies to know about your treatment, then also don’t use insurance to pay for medication at a pharmacy, as the pharmacy will inform the insurance company about the prescription.
There are several emergency situations that state laws require us to act on. Though each state has its own laws, typically if you are in imminent danger because of overwhelming suicidal impulses, you are a danger to someone else because of homicidal impulses, or you tell us about child or elder abuse, we both are required to act and want to act to save lives and prevent abuse.
It is possible that courts or the State or Federal government will subpoena some protected health information. If that happens, we will use any legal right we have to inform you of the subpoena and ask whether you want us to release the information or fight it. If you ask us to fight it, we won’t release it unless we are legally compelled to do so.
Your rights
HIPAA: An entity must describe the individual’s rights with respect to the information and how the individual may exercise these rights, including how the individual may complain to the entity.
healthPiper: You have the right to your protected health information, both morally and legally. We will provide it to you whenever you ask. Most of your records can be seen directly, at any time, because they are in your instant message thread. If you ever have an issue, just message us in the app, and we will jump on it.
Our legal duties
HIPAA: An entity must describe its legal duties with respect to the information, including a statement that the covered entity is required by law to maintain the privacy of protected health information.
healthPiper: We are required by law to maintain the privacy of your protected health information. And even if the law changes, we still will keep protecting it, anyway.
Questions about this policy
HIPAA: An entity must describe whom individuals can contact for further information about the entity’s privacy policies.
healthPiper: Just message us in our app. We provide our full policies right here on our privacy page, and are always happy to answer questions.
Some legal details
The HIPAA privacy law defines “covered entities” as an organization or doctor that provides treatment, and “business associates” as an organization or person that works with covered entities doing an activity that requires access to protected health information.
HealthPiper is an umbrella term for two separate companies: healthPiper PC, which contracts with the clinicians and is responsible for providing clinical treatment, and healthPiper LLC, which built and maintains the apps, the website, the cloud software, runs operations and employs the concierges. Under HIPAA, healthPiper PC is the covered entity, and healthPiper LLC is the business associate. Both are bound by this same privacy policy.
Internet technology
We use Amazon and Microsoft cloud services to store the information we use. Protecting the information is always on our mind, and whenever we learn or come up with an additional way to strengthen our security, we do it.
We use standard methods to make our services run well, like Google Analytics to see how people move through our sites. Google puts cookies on users’ browsers in this process. We only get group information from Google about use of our site—we never see, and don’t want to see, the click history of a specific person.
“Intelligent” technology
Computers programmed to use machine learning have proven that they can discern clinically important patterns in large datasets of health records that humans cannot otherwise detect. The computers might use the information they glean to make treatment safer and more effective.
HealthPiper’s culture and purpose for existence is to treat our clients right. We believe machine learning holds vast promise for good, and so we use computers to analyze information from the treatment we provide in order to discover ways to improve care that may be too complex and unexpected for human intelligence to perceive. But we always do our analysis within our HIPAA walls, so that no protected health information leaves them.
And we will never sell any protected health information, to anyone, ever.
How the healthPiper collaborative team works
The healthPiper app or website connects you to your own private instant message thread with healthPiper. There are several people monitoring the thread on our end. Your first message will be from either the “Maître d” psychiatrist or your concierge, who will welcome you to healthPiper, explain the process, and answer your questions.
If healthPiper is a good fit for you, we schedule an appointment with a healthPiper psychiatrist. When anyone writes in the thread, either you or someone at our end, their name is included in their message.
In addition to the people at our end actively writing in the message thread, we have one or more monitors who read the thread but don’t typically respond in it. The monitors maintain confidentiality under the same HIPAA and healthPiper guidelines as those actively writing in the thread.