Medical Cost Advocate Privacy Policy

Welcome

At Medical Cost Advocate, Inc. (Medical Cost Advocate), we understand that your health is a very personal matter, and we appreciate the trust you place in us to treat your information carefully and sensibly. As part of our commitment to honoring your privacy, we provide this policy (“privacy policy”) to make you aware of what information Medical Cost Advocate gathers from you, choices you have about the way your information is used and to explain how we guard your information. We hope this policy will help you make informed decisions about sharing information with us.

Information Collection

In connection with your use of Medical Cost Advocate services, we may request and store various information from you:

• When you register and use Medical Cost Advocate services, we request and store some of your personal and health information, including, but not limited to: name, address, email, insurance information, medical provider information and medical bill data. This information needs to be collected, maintained and made available to Medical Cost Advocate professionals so that we can administer our negotiation program on your behalf.
• Email, fax and electronic file communication that you send to us via the links on our Website may be shared with negotiation professionals, customer service specialists and/or the Medical Cost Advocate employee that is most likely to be able to address your inquiry. If you provide personal and health information in your email, it will be used only for the purposes of answering your email. From time to time, we may send you service-related emails, such as a welcome email when you register with our Website.
• In addition to the individual-oriented information above, Medical Cost Advocate may collect and store aggregate user statistics and other information about the online activities of customers, such as tracking the number of customers who use certain features of our service.

Information Management

As a registered user of the Medical Cost Advocate Website, you can create and store your important medical and billing information in one secure place. The information in your account, which includes your medical bill portfolio, may be self-reported and augmented for our negotiation outcomes and you may choose to supplement this information with records that you fax to us or electronic files that you attach in an email to us. We will enable you to store personal and health information about yourself and your dependants so you only have to enter it once. We may also receive records from health plans, providers and others on your behalf. Access to information received from third parties may require an additional level of registration and authentication, and we will verify your identity before you can enter and retrieve information on our Website.

Efforts we take to safeguard your information

We are committed to protecting the security of your information through dedicated processes and technology including the following:

• We will verify your identity through your user name and password before you can enter and retrieve information on our website.
• We limit access to your personal and health information to employees having a reasonable need to access this information who provide services to you. Employees who misuse information are subject to disciplinary action, including termination.
• We have physical, technical and procedural safeguards to help protect your personal and health information and safely dispose of information no longer needed.
• In areas that contain your personal information, health information and credit/debit card information, we use secure socket layer (SSL) encryption to help protect this information while it is in transit between our servers and your computer.
• Regardless of the precautions we take, "perfect security" does not exist on the Internet. We cannot ensure or warrant the security of information you transmit to Medical Cost Advocate. You transmit and authorize Medical Cost Advocate to transmit and store such information at your own risk.

Use of your information

Medical Cost Advocate uses the information collected from the site to conduct our negotiation services and to provide you with related information services. Medical Cost Advocate may use certain pieces of information, collected through registration or otherwise, to construct aggregate (non-personal) demographic or statistical profiles of our customer group and the nature of transactions entered in our Website.

Disclosure of your information

The personal and health information you provide during registration and bill entry will not be disclosed to third parties but rather will be used for negotiations and to identify you and contact you related to negotiation outcomes. Your information will only be made available to you, your healthcare provider and Medical Cost Advocate. We ensure that your healthcare provider exercises the same level of care that we do when we exchange information with them. In the course of Medical Cost Advocate’s business development and for other lawful purposes, the company may disclose aggregated or summary level (non-personal) data about our customer group as a whole in order to describe the size and demographics of our services.

What you can do to help keep your information secure

• Choose your passwords carefully: Always create a password that’s easy for you to remember but difficult for someone else to figure out. Don’t use your name, address, phone number, initials, Social Security number, license plate or birthday. Don’t use names of your friends, family or pets, company names, common numerical sequences or the word “password.” Suggestion: Use a mix of special characters, numbers, and letters. Also, remember to change your password occasionally and never give your password to anyone.
• Log out and close your browser: Open browsers invite intrusion. When you finish your online session, close your browser to erase any information it may have temporarily stored on your computer.
• Install anti-virus software and spyware protection: Viruses are dangerous. Many viruses are sent as email attachments. They can slip into your system without your knowledge the moment you open the email. Some viruses such as Trojan Horses can capture the contents of your system, including your passwords. Installing up-to-date anti-virus software and running it will help thwart these and other unwanted programs.

Other Privacy Information

Please remember that any information you voluntarily disclose online, in any news or message postings or chat rooms, may be collected and used by others without your permission. Furthermore, if you provide any information to parties who provide Websites that are linked to or from Medical Cost Advocate, different rules may apply to their collection, use or disclosure of your personal information. We encourage you to review these Websites' policies before revealing any sensitive or personal information. Finally, it may be necessary to revise our Internet privacy policy to keep it current with changing industry standards and regulations. We reserve the right to make changes to provide you with better service.

This Internet privacy policy describes Medical Cost Advocate's policies and practices for collecting, handling and protecting information you may provide while at our Website. If you have any comments, or concerns about our Internet privacy policy or the information practices of this website, please contact us at inquiry@medicalcostadvocate.com or by mail at: