[CAD] Compliance with Privacy Laws in Newfoundland and Labrador (PHIA)
The
Personal Health Information Act (PHIA) is Newfoundland and Labrador’s privacy law relating to health records that has been that has been deemed “substantially similar” to the federal private sector privacy law with respect to health information custodians.
Owl and PHIA
Owl helps practices comply with PHIA in a number of ways, as PHIA requires several specific procedural safeguards not required by PIPEDA:
- Take reasonable precautions to safeguard personal health information, including:
- Protection against unauthorized use, disclosure, copying, modification or destruction: Owl’s User Types allow practices to achieve this security, as Office Admin and Therapist Users can be limited from accessing certain types of information in the practice that they may not need access to.
- Notification to an individual at the first reasonable opportunity if the information is stolen, lost or accessed by an unauthorized person: While we take significant and extensive measures to ensure a security breach could never occur, if one was to take place, we would of course notify our customers immediately so that you could fulfill your obligations under PHIA.
- Ensure health records are stored, transferred and disposed of in a secure manner: Data is destroyed by removing it from all of our systems. We own all hardware that stores any of our customers data which means we own the hard drives. Once we remove data from the hard drives we then overwrite it with other data to ensure it's deleted.
- Provide a written statement that is readily available to the public and describes [...] a custodian’s information practices: Owl has some suggested language and guidance to help clinics inform Clients about Owl over at our FAQ: https://faq.owlpractice.ca/should-i-reference-owl-on-my-practice-consent-forms
Source:
PHIA FAQs, p. 18
Other Legislation
Other acts that may be potentially relevant to clinics in Newfoundland and Labrador are:
The Office of the Information and Privacy Commissioner for Newfoundland and Labrador can be reached through the contact details
on this website.
