Privacy Policy

The AWRC understands how important the privacy of personal information is to our physician-customers. AWRC is committed to honoring your privacy, and to offering special protections for any personal information you choose to share with us. The document you are reading is our privacy policy for educational activities that are accessible by physicians, and it describes what information we may collect about you, what uses we may make of it, how you can tell us what to do with your information, and what precautions we take against unauthorized access or use of your information.

Continuing Medical Education

When you register for a Continuing Medical Education ("CME") or a Continuing Education ("CE") activity, certain personally identifiable information is collected from you such as your name, email address and mailing address. In addition to personally identifiable information, we collect aggregated non-personally identifiable information about the activities undertaken by our users. The information collected may be used in several ways:

  1. AWRC is accredited by the Accreditation Council for Continuing Medical Education ("ACCME") to provide continuing medical education for physicians. As an ACCME accredited entity, we are required periodically to submit aggregated data about CME participants and the CME activities we certify. These reports may include personally identifiable information about you and credits issued to you, for the purpose of maintaining records that you can request from the accredited provider for up to six (6) years
  2. Commercial supporters of CME/CE activities will receive only aggregated data about CME/CE activities that are relevant to their interests and/or the activities they support
  3. The AWRC staff will have access to files containing personally identifiable information, including evaluation forms and aggregated CME/CE participant information. These files can be accessed in order to respond to your questions or comments. Our staff may also use personally identifiable information, including registration information and evaluation data, in assessing educational needs and planning marketing activities

We may use the information collected as otherwise permitted in this Privacy Policy.

Aggregate Data

We create aggregate data about participants in our educational activities for educational development and improvement. We may also use it for market analysis. We may provide information from the Website in aggregate form, with identifying information removed, to third parties. For example, we may tell a health care partner what percentage of our registered users reside in a particular geographical area. When aggregated information is provided, we pool it from many individual records and strip it of any data that could be used to identify an individual before it is used. Any third party that receives aggregated data must agree not to attempt to re-identify the people it belongs to.

Changes in Our Privacy Policy

It is our goal to use personal information and personal health information in the manner described in the privacy policy that is in effect when your information is collected. We do, however, reserve the right to change the terms of this privacy policy at any time, and revisions will posted on this site.

Third Parties

In addition to aggregate information (discussed previously), we may share some kinds of information with third parties as described below.

  • Other Companies: We have strategic relationships with other companies who support CME. When you are interacting with those companies, different rules and privacy policies may apply.
  • Companies and People Who Work for Us: Because we are a health care system, we contract with other companies and individuals to help us provide services. For example, we may host some of our activities on another company's computers, hire technical consultants, or work with companies to remove repetitive information from customer lists, analyze data, provide marketing assistance, and provide customer service. In order to perform their jobs, these other companies may have limited access to some of the personal information we maintain about our users. We require all such companies to comply with the terms of our privacy policies, to limit their access to any personal information to the minimum necessary to perform their obligations, and not to use the information they may access for purposes other than fulfilling their responsibilities to us. We use our best efforts to limit the use of other companies in areas where personally identifiable information may be involved.
  • Legal Requirements: We may release account and other personal information when we believe release is required to comply with law. When we share information with third parties, we ask that they agree in writing to abide by the AWRC privacy policies.

If we discover that a third party inadvertently disclosed personal information about any of our customers, we will take immediate action to prevent further occurrences.

Other than the cases described above, the AWRC will not release personally identifiable information to a third party without the user's consent. Also, if we ask your consent to release personal information to a third party, we will use our best efforts to clearly define

Storage of Health Information

Personally identifiable information you share with us is stored on our database servers at Baylor Health Care System data centers or hosted by third parties who have entered into agreements with us that require them to observe our Privacy Policy. We have a firewall to prevent individuals from accessing information without authorization. Data centers are physically secure and protected from unauthorized access by unauthorized persons. Physical access to the servers requires individual authorization and authentication. Information in our data centers is backed up routinely, in order to aid in the recovery of information in the event of accidental damage of information or due to a natural disaster. The backup media is stored in a physically secure storage facility. Although we make every reasonable effort to protect personal information and personal health information from loss, misuse, or alteration by third parties, you should be aware that there is always some risk involved in transmitting information via the Internet and that hackers or thieves do find ways to thwart security systems. We use 128-bit secured socket layer encryption techniques for sending and receiving data.

The AWRC Employees

The employees of AWRC are required to keep customer information private, as a condition of their employment. Only selected, authorized employees of AWRC are permitted to access your health information.

Privacy Questions or Concerns

For privacy questions or concerns about one of AWRC's activities, please contact Barbara Grayson at .

Last Review Date: This policy was last reviewed in August 2007.