November 2012
At HealthUnlocked we believe in the potential of shared experiences to transform lives and uncover understanding in health. Because this may involve you sharing sensitive information about your health and treatment we also believe in the importance of clear and transparent privacy guidelines. As a user it’s important you know how we use and share your data and how you can control what happens to information you share in HealthUnlocked.
Here’s a simple guide:
HealthUnlocked is owned and operated by Everything Unlocked Limited registered in England and Wales under company number 6596274. Its registered office is: 133 Great Suffolk Street, First floor, London SE1 1PP.
None of your personally identifiable information (email address, postcode/zipcode, date of birth) is ever visible to other users or third parties without your explicit consent. We encourage you to choose a non-identifiable username as this is visible to other users.
Who can see the blogs and questions I write?
You always choose which groups of users can see the blogs and questions you publish. You can either restrict your blog/question to members of the community or share it for others on the web. If there is anything which you are not comfortable sharing with these groups, you should not include it in blogs and questions.
Restricting questions and blogs to members of the community only also means they will not be analysed for research.
HealthUnlocked may anonymize and aggregate information collected through the service (e.g. polls, symptom surveys etc). This information may then be published as a study or shared with our research partners. You can always control whether your information is used in this way by following the instructions below.
You always control who can see your information and how it is shared. At any time you can change your data sharing settings to stop sharing information you submit with our research partners. You will still able to use our service.
We may contact you for research purposes, such as taking part in surveys or clinical trial recruitment. In this case it will always be HealthUnlocked that contacts you, not a research partner directly as we never share your email address with third parties. You can opt out of being contacted for research purposes at any time.
HU Communities are free for patients and charities. In addition to our licensed softwares such as HU for Doctors and GP Communities we work with research partners allowing them to access anonymised and aggregated data from HealthUnlocked services.
This only happens where users give their consent to share information and users can opt out at any time as set out above.
Patient Organizations using HealthUnlocked can access and export anonymised and aggregate data reports from members within their HealthUnlocked community who have chosen to share their data.
Doctors and Healthcare Professionals use HealthUnlocked to manage their patients online. Information will not be made available to doctors unless a patients chooses to share this information with. If patients consent, this information can also be used and aggregated for research and audit by the doctors in their academic studies.
Health Institutions (e.g. NHS or Department of Health) and Companies (Pharmaceuticals or Medical Devices) use HealthUnlocked to research the experience of patients. This may be analysis of data submitted by users of the HealthUnlocked service, or through more structured studies alongside doctors and patients. This only happens where users give their consent to share information and users can opt out at any time as set out above.
We provide industry standard security across all of our platforms and comply with health IT standards. In addition, we have secure connections (HTTPS) with 128 bit encryption certificates across all the areas where personal details are used and stored. All passwords assigned during the signup processes are protected using salted cryptographic hashing, and cannot be decrypted.
Our servers are hosted in a protected environments with secure backups performed regularly and compliant with ISO27001, HIPAA and NHS IG ToolKit level 2.
We update our security system regularly and perform ongoing research on new practices and technologies that can improve our services.
Our service is hosted on third party servers with may be outside the EEA. We have contracts in place with our third party service providers which require them to implement security measures to protect the data they hold and the current security provisions in place are described above.
HealthUnlocked uses cookies to provide basic functionality and to improve the performance and user experience throughout the site. We may also store encrypted information about you using cookies which we can access when you visit our site in future.
Learn more about HealthUnlocked, cookies and how you can control which cookies are used here. Cookies
By becoming an account holder, you agree that we may provide you with information about Our Site (whether by email or any other medium) that we consider appropriate. You may opt-out of receiving these materials and notifications in the "settings" area of your account or by writing to or emailing us to inform us that you wish to be removed from our contact list.
We offer a system that has an ultra-secure database for clinical data storage (compliant with regulations) and a separate database to allow patients to control their own data. This satisfies the ethical and legal requirements of safety of clinical data whilst providing the flexibility needed to offer secondary data services.
Only for HealthUnlocked In Clinic premium services. However, we do offer to all our UK based doctors users a system that is connected with the N3. Where we store clinical data this is usually under a contract with a NHS body under which the NHS body retains responsibility for how the data is used. You should read their privacy policy for more information about how they use your personal data.
Please put your request in writing and send it to HealthUnlocked, First Floor, 133 Great Suffolk Street. London, UK, SE1 1PP. We reserve the right to charge a fee of £10.
Please contact us on contact@healthunlocked.com