THIS NOTICE DESCRIBES HOW MEDICAL INFORMATION ABOUT YOU MAY BE USED AND DISCLOSED AND HOW YOU CAN GET ACCESS TO THIS INFORMATION. PLEASE REVIEW IT CAREFULLY.

Purpose of This Notice: CALSTAR is required by law to maintain the privacy of certain confidential health care information, known as Protected Health Information or PHI, and to provide you with a notice of our legal duties and privacy practices with respect to your PHI. This Notice describes your legal rights, advises you of our privacy practices, and lets you know how CALSTAR is permitted to use and disclose PHI about you.

CALSTAR is also required to abide by the terms of the version of this Notice currently in effect. In most situations, we may use this information as described in this Notice without your permission, but there are some situations where we may use it only after we obtain your written authorization, if we are required to do so by law.

Uses and Disclosures of PHI: CALSTAR may use PHI for the purposes of treatment, payment, and health care operations, in most cases without your written permission. Examples of our use of your PHI:

For Treatment: This includes such things as verbal and written information that we obtain about you and use pertaining to your medical condition and treatment provided to you by us and other medical personnel (including doctors and nurses who give orders to allow us to provide treatment to you.) It also includes information we give to other health care personnel to whom we transfer your care and treatment, and includes transfer of PHI via radio or telephone to the hospital or our dispatch center as well as providing the hospital with a copy of the written record we create in the course of providing you with treatment and transport.

For Payment: This includes any activities we must undertaken order to get reimbursed for the services we provide to you, including such things as organizing your PHI and submitting bills to insurance companies (either directly or through a third party billing company), management of billed claims for services rendered, medical necessity determinations and reviews, utilization review, and collection of outstanding accounts.

For health care operations: This includes quality assurance activities, licensing, and training programs to ensure that our personnel meet our standards of care and follow established policies and procedures, obtaining legal and financial services, conducting business planning, processing grievances and complaints, creating reports that do not individually identify you for data collection purposes, fundraising, and certain marketing activities.

Fundraising: We may contact you when we are in the process of raising funds for CALSTAR, or provide you with information about our annual subscription program.

Use and Disclosure of Your PHI Without Your Authorization: CALSTAR is permitted to use PHI without your written authorization or opportunity to object in certain situations, including:

_ For CALSTAR’s use in treating you or in obtaining payment for services provided to
you or in other health care operations;
_ For the treatment activities of another health care provider;
_ To another health care provider or entity for the payment activities of the provider or
entity that receives the information (such as your hospital or insurance company);
_ To another health care provider (such as the hospital to which you are transported) for
the health care operations of that entity, as long as that entity has had a relationship
with you and the PHI pertains to that relationship;
_ For health care fraud and abuse detection or for activities related to compliance with
the law;
_ To a family member, other relative, or close personal friend or other individual
involved in your care if we obtain your verbal agreement to do so or if we give you the
opportunity to object to such a disclosure and you do not raise such an objection. We
may also disclose health information to your family, relatives, or friends if we infer
from the circumstances that you would not object. For example, we may assume you
agree to our disclosure of your PHI to your spouse when your spouse was present
when CALSTAR transported you. In situations where you are not capable of objecting
(because you are not present or due to your incapacity or medical emergency), we may,
in our professional judgment, determine that disclosure to a family member or friend
is in your best interest. In that situation, we will disclose only health information
relevant to that person’s involvement in your care;
_ To a public health authority in certain situations (such as reporting a birth, death, or
disease as required by law, as part of a public health investigation, to report child or
adult abuse/neglect or domestic violence, to report adverse events such as product
defects, or to notify a person about exposure to a possible communicable disease as
required by law;
_ For health oversight activities including audits or government investigations,
inspections, disciplinary proceedings, and other administrative or judicial actions
undertaken by the government by law to oversee the health care system;
_ For judicial and administrative proceedings as required by a court or administrative
order, or in some cases in response to a subpoena or other legal process;
_ For law enforcement activities in limited situations, such as when there is a warrant for
the request, or when the information is needed to locate a suspect or stop a crime;
_ For military, national defense and security and other special government functions;
_ To avert a serious threat to the health and safety of a person or the public at large;
_ For workers’ compensation purposes, and in compliance with workers’ compensation
laws;
_ To coroners, medical examiners, and funeral directors for identifying a deceased
person, determining cause of death, or carrying on their duties as authorized by law;
_ If you are an organ donor, we may release health information to organizations that
handle organ procurement or organ, eye, or tissue transplantation or to an organ donor
bank, as necessary to facilitate organ donation and transplantation;
_ For research projects, but this will be subject to strict oversight and approvals and
health information will only be released when there is a minimal risk to your privacy
and adequate safeguards are in place in accordance with the law;
_ We may use or disclose health information about you in a way that does not personally
identify you or reveal who you are.

Any other use or disclosure of PHI, other than those listed above, will be made with your written authorization, (the information must specifically identify the information we seek to use or disclose, as well as when and how we seek to use or disclose it.) You may revoke your authorization at any time, in writing, except to the extent that we have already used or disclosed the information in reliance on that authorization.

Patient Rights: As a patient, you have a number of rights with respect to the protection of your PHI, including:

The right to access, copy, or inspect your PHI: This means you may come to our offices and inspect and copy most of the medical information about you that we maintain. We will normally provide you with access to this information within 30 days of your request. We may also charge you a reasonable fee for you to copy any medical information that you may have the right to access. In limited circumstances, we may deny you access to your medical information, and you may appeal certain types of denials.

We have available forms to request access to your PHI and we will provide you a written response if we deny you access and let you know your appeal rights. If you wish to inspect and copy your medical information, you should contact the privacy officer listed at the end of this Notice.

The right to amend your PHI: You have the right to ask us to amend written medical information that we may have about you. We will generally amend your information within 60 days of your request and will notify you when we have amended the information. We are permitted by law to deny you your request to amend your medical information only in certain circumstances, like when we believe the information you have asked us to amend is correct. If you wish to request that we amend the medical information that we have about you, you should contact the privacy officer listed at the end of this Notice.

The right to request an accounting of our use and disclosure of your PHI: You may request an accounting from us of certain disclosures of your medical information that we have made in the last six years prior to the date of your request. We are not required to give you an accounting of information we have used or disclosed for the purposes of treatment, payment, or health care operations, or when we share your health information with our business associates, like our billing company or a medical facility from/to which we have transported you.

We are also not required to give you an accounting of our uses of PHI for which you have already given use written authorization. If you wish to request an accounting of the medical information that we have used or disclosed that is not exempted from the accounting requirement, you should contact the privacy officer listed at the end of this Notice.

The right to request that we restrict the uses and disclosures of your PHI: You have the right to request that we restrict how we use and disclose your medical information that we have about you for treatment, payment, health care operations, or to restrict the information that is provided to family, friends and other individuals involved in your health care. But if you request a restriction and the information you asked us to restrict is needed to provide you with emergency treatment, then we may use or disclose the PHI to a health care provider to provide you with emergency treatment. CALSTAR is not required to agree to any restrictions you request, but any restrictions agreed to by CALSTAR are binding on CALSTAR.

Internet, Electronic Mail, and the Right to Obtain Copy of Paper Notice on Request: If we maintain a web site, we will prominently post a copy of this Notice on our web site and make the Notice available electronically through the web site. If you allow us, we will forward you this Notice by electronic mail instead of on paper and you may always request a paper copy of the Notice.

Revisions to the Notice: CALSTAR reserves the right to change the terms of this Notice at any time, and the changes will be effective immediately and will apply to all protected health information that we maintain. Any material changes to the Notice will be promptly available through our offices and posted on our web site, if we maintain one. You can get a copy of the latest version of this Notice by contacting the Privacy Officer identified below.

Your Legal Rights and Complaints: You also have the right to complain to us, or to the Secretary of the United States Department of Health and Human Services if you believe your privacy rights have been violated. You will not be retaliated against in any way for filing a complaint with us or to the government. Should you have any questions, comments or complaints, you may direct all inquiries to the Privacy Officer listed at the end of this Notice.

If you have any questions or if you wish to file a complaint or exercise any rights listed in this Notice, please contact:

Privacy Officer
CALSTAR
4933 Bailey Loop

McClellan, CA 95652

(916) 921-4000

(916) 921-4099 Fax

Effective Date of The Notice: April 14, 2003