Our Privacy Policy
The Direct Reimbursement Associates Privacy Policy informs you of our commitment to your privacy regarding our service for an employee health benefits plan to provide health and dental coverage. It describes how we ensure your privacy and how we maintain the confidentiality of your employee benefits information. This policy applies to personal and corporate customers with medical benefits, and also includes individuals carrying on business alone with self employed benefits or in partnership with other individuals for full health and dental coverage.
1. Why Do We Need Your Information?
Dealing with your confidential personal health and dental plan information is essential to adjudicating your claim at Direct Reimbursement Associates. As is the nature of this business, we collect and store information about you and your claims for health and dental coverage. We need this information about your medical benefits for 4 reasons:
- to ensure you are eligible for health and dental coverage
- to adjudicate your medical coverage claims in accordance with the Income Tax Act
- to record the financial details of the reimbursement transactions
- to retain any tax related information for reporting purposes
2. What Do We Collect?
We limit the information we collect to what we need for the provision of our health and dental service plans. We use it only for that purpose. We obtain most of our information about you and your employees directly from you. As the planholder (employer) providing employee benefits you are permitted to release this employee information. We do not collect additional personal information about you or your employees from any other third parties regarding health and dental plans. We do not monitor or record your telephone discussions with our staff with the exception of optional voice mail or email messages you may choose to leave, whether it is about your employee benefits or other unrelated information.
3. What Do We Share?
We do not share your personal information with anyone. Specifically, we do not share your contact information including phone number or email with any third parties. The only exception to this commitment is to Government of Canada regulatory bodies when we are required to do so by law, and only by written request for such information. We will notify you should such a request be received. At no time will information be released about your employee benefits plan, health & dental plan provisions or medical coverage unless such notification has been provided.
4. How Do We Store and Handle Your Information?
In the past, original paper copies of all health expenses were required. This restriction has been eliminated. Effective November 2013, Direct Reimbursement Associates now stores all information about your medical benefits plan, health & dental plan provisions, employee benefits claims, and medical coverage receipts in electronic format.
All paper based information received at our office about your medical benefits plan, health & dental plan provisions, employee benefits claims, and medical coverage receipts are scanned and stored offline on computers. After being scanned, all paper-based information is securely shredded and destroyed.
Direct Reimbursement Associates recognizes the importance of privacy and security of the information about your medical benefits plan, health & dental plan provisions, employee benefits claims, and medical coverage receipts. We have established a second computer network within our central office that is never connected to the Internet. There are no wireless cards, or cable connections to the Internet making our computers and network system completely independent and free standing within our office. The standard physical safeguards, security locks and protection are in place to protect the computers from physical interference by unauthorized entities.
We retain your corporate or sole proprietorship financial information in electronic format for the planholder year end tax reporting purposes. We retain information about your medical benefits plan, health & dental plan provisions, employee benefits claims, and medical coverage receipts in electronic format in case you directly enquire about your status. The length of time we store this information depends on regulatory requirements. This period may extend beyond the time you are a customer of Direct Reimbursement Associates Ltd. We will only store it for as long as it is legally necessary for Direct Reimbursement Associates Ltd. to. This is currently seven (7) years. All employees and functionaries of Direct Reimbursement Associates are familiar with this policy and follow procedures to safeguard your privacy.
5. Our Website
When you go to our website and read pages, or move from page to page, or download content onto your computer, we do not record your personal identity in any way. We do, however, make use of Internet cookies to track the sequence and duration of which pages are viewed on our website. Our Internet cookie is a small, non-intrusive file stored on the computer connecting to our website. The purpose of these tracking cookies is to improve page sequence design and page content of our website. Our intention is simply to maximize the value of the website to our other potential customers. We believe our service is sufficiently beneficial to our customers that we do not need to resort to any form of deceitful or misleading marketing. All information collected as a result of these Internet cookies is aggregated into statistical data, and no information specifically about you in particular will be identifiable as a result of visiting our website.
Our website does have the capability of receiving information from new customers who are registering for a plan as well as the submission of health and dental plan claims from existing customers registered for an employee benefits plan with Direct Reimbursement Associates Ltd. This information includes your corporate or sole proprietorship contact and financial information as well as your medical benefits plan, health & dental plan provisions, employee benefits claims, and medical coverage receipts. We have established current industry-standard protection around this information on our server.
However as Direct Reimbursement Associates has a higher internal standard for the security of your corporate or sole proprietorship contact and financial information as well as your medical benefits plan, health & dental plan provisions, employee benefits claims, and medical coverage receipts, we have built a proprietary process to download this information to our central office and move it to our second internal offline computer system. The data is then purged from our secure webserver. This is a manual process conducted multiple times per business day. So while you will upload your information to our secure server, it will reside there only for a short period of time.
At no time will Direct Reimbursement Associates build a customer user access portal for online convenience. Information about your medical benefits plan, health & dental plan provisions, employee benefits claims, and medical coverage receipts is customarily not something that is accessed on a daily or even monthly basis. Direct Reimbursement Associates has committed to employ sufficient staff to answer phone calls in person during business hours to address any questions you or your employees may have about the status of their health and dental plan or employee benefits. While this may seem an inconvenience, we feel it achieves an extra level of confidence regarding the privacy of the personal information you have entrusted to our care.
6. Email
Email sent over the Internet is not encrypted and can be intercepted. Direct Reimbursement Associates will not request that you transmit via email any confidential information regarding your medical benefits plan, health & dental plan provisions, employee benefits claims, and medical coverage receipts. However, if you explicitly ask and agree to receive information by email we will comply, and if you choose to send personal information to us by email we will accept and respond to it. We recommend caution when sending email messages to us and that you do not include confidential information in those messages.
When you send us an email or when you ask us to respond to you by email, we learn your exact email address and any information you have included in the email. In accordance with Canada’s anti-spam legislation we will only use your email address to acknowledge your comments and/or reply to your questions. We will store your communication and our reply in case we need to correspond further. If you are not a customer, we will not use your email address to solicit your potential business after an unsolicited enquiry. Furthermore, we will not sell your email address to anyone, nor allow any third parties to have access to your email address or other contact information for any reason whatsoever. If you are an existing customer, we will use your email address to send you reminder notices about your year end and to send notifications of the dispatch of any reimbursement payments. If you don’t want us to contact you by email, you may tell us so at any time.
7. Contact
If you have any concerns, please contact our Privacy Officer by email or write to us at
Privacy Officer
Direct Reimbursement Associates Ltd
Box 388
Pincher Creek, Alberta
T0K 1W0