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. This Privacy Statement applies to www.medicalcostadvocate.com owned and operated by Medical Cost Advocate Inc. 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.

If you have an unresolved privacy or data use concern that we have not addressed satisfactorily, please contact our U.S.-based third party dispute resolution provider (free of charge) at TRUSTe here.

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 and advocacy 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. You may unsubscribe by replying to any emails and asking to be removed from future emails.
• 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.
• The site also collects third party dependent information such as name, email, phone number and group insurance number in order to submit a bill for review.

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 dependents 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. Upon request, Medical Cost Advocate will provide you with information about whether we hold any of your personal information. If a user wishes to change, update and delete their personal information they may do so by logging into their account, selecting the "Manage My Account" option and changing the information online. If at any time you no longer wish to continue your account with Medical Cost Advocate, please click the "Contact Us" link and send us an email asking to be removed from our customer database. We will respond to your request within a reasonable timeframe. Medical Cost Advocate will promptly eliminate your customer records and delete your personal information stored in our database.

Data Retention

We will retain your information for as long as your account is active or as needed to provide you services. We will retain and use your information as necessary to comply with our legal obligations, resolve disputes, and enforce our agreement.

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.
• We use secure socket layer (SSL) encryption to help protect this information while it is in transit between your computer and our servers.
• In areas that contain your personal information, health information and credit/debit card information, we encrypt private data elements.
• While Medical Cost Advocate takes all reasonable precautions, "perfect security" does not exist on the Internet. We cannot guarantee that all information stored on our servers, or transmitted to or from a user, will be free from unauthorized access, and we disclaim any liability for any theft or loss of, unauthorized access or damage to, or interception of any data or communications. By using the Site, you acknowledge that you understand and agree to assume these risks.

Use of your information

Medical Cost Advocate uses the information collected from the site to conduct our negotiation and advocacy 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. Medical Cost Advocate makes use of cookies for website visitors to collect aggregate information on the number of visitors to our site and other information about the number of pages viewed on the site. We use both session ID cookies and persistent cookies. A session ID cookie expires when you close your browser. A persistent cookie remains on your hard drive for an extended period of time. No information collected in this manner is linked to personal or health information. Cookie information is used only by Medical Cost Advocate to analyze, track and optimize traffic on our website. If you reject cookies, you may still use our site, but your ability to use some areas of our site will be limited.

As is true of most Web sites, we use a third party tracking service to gather certain information automatically and store it in log files. This information includes internet protocol (IP) addresses, browser type, internet service provider (ISP), referring/exit pages, operating system, date/time stamp, and clickstream data. Technologies such as: cookies or similar technologies are used by Medical Cost Advocate and our partners, or analytics or service providers. We may receive reports based on the use of these technologies by these companies on an aggregated basis. We use this information, which does not identify individual users, to analyze trends, to administer the site, to track users movements around the site and to gather demographic information about our user base as a whole.

Disclosure of your information

The personal and health information you provide during registration and bill entry will not be disclosed to third parties for their promotional purposes, but rather will be used for negotiation and advocacy 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. In certain situations, Medical Cost Advocate may be required to disclose personal data in response to lawful requests by public authorities. In the event personal information must be disclosed to judicial or other government agencies subject to laws, statutes, warrants, subpoenas, or similar legal process and other governmental orders, Medical Cost Advocate shall disclose only such part of the personal Information as is specifically required by the terms of such legal order. If Medical Cost Advocate is involved in a merger, acquisition, or sale of all or a portion of it’s assets, you will be notified via email and/or prominent notice on our Website of any change in ownership or uses of your personal information, as well as any choices you may have regarding your personal information.

We may provide your personal information to companies that provide services to help us with our business activities such as verifying payment information. These companies are authorized to user your personal information only as necessary to provide these services to you.

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. To request removal of your personal information from our blog or community forum, contact us at inquiry@medicalcostadvocate.com. 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 modify this privacy statement at any time, so please review it frequently. If we make material changes to this policy, we will notify you here, by email, or by means of a notice on our home page prior to the change becoming effective.

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. This policy became effective in June of 2006 and is updated periodically. 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: