Privacy Policies For Dental Websites

GDPR PRIVACY POLICY REQUIREMENTS

Privacy Policies are part of the General Data Protection Regulation and your website must include these in order for your dental practice to comply. Privacy Policies are different from your standard Policies and Procedures where you may inform patients about complaints, violent behaviour or missed appointments. These could be displayed in various places around your website but it would be wise to include a dedicated section to highlight three key requirements which I have listed below.

WHAT SHOULD PRIVACY POLICIES INCLUDE?

General Data Protection Regulation, or GDPR as it is more commonly know as, requires you to make sure you have the right privacy policies in place in order to protect dental patients data. It is advisable to create a separate page on your dental website to include your data protection procedures. These could include a whole raft of information such as the possible breach of data, request for access to data, deleting personal data, consent for marketing and so on. The main points you must have procedures in place for are as follows:

1. WHAT YOU INTEND TO USE PATIENT’S DATA FOR?

For example, if your dental website has an enquiry form on your contact page or any other page, you may wish to capture as many potential new patient data to send them future emails for marketing purposes. In this case you must offer the user a choice to opt-in or out and state on the privacy policy page any other ways in which you intend to use their data.

2. WHERE ARE YOU STORING PATIENT’S DATA?

Many dental practices store data on specialist dental software programmes and you should know if the data files are backed-up and where they are stored? Do you know which other storage facilities you have and who has access to them? Make you contact your dental software companies, IT consultants or dental compliance advisors to ensure you are protecting your patients data as well as your business.

3. HOW LONG YOU INTEND TO KEEP THE DATA?

Active patients are usually regularly contacted and do you know whether they have given you consent to how they prefer to be contacted? For deceased patient records, patients who have moved away or potential new dental patients you have records for, make sure you have a policy in place to let them know how long you store their personal data for.

WHO CAN HELP YOU?

There are dedicated dental compliance companies out there who can guide you. They can provide you with the necessary information you must display on your dental website as well as the compliant policies required within your dental practice. For more information about GDPR for dental websites visit the GDPR section on the design4dentists blog.
Find out more about GDPR for Dental Websites >

DENTAL MARKETING & DENTAL BRANDING
For more information about GDPR for your dental websites and Privacy Policies contact Alex Nicolaou on 01923 609770 or to find out more about GDC and CQC compliance click the link below:
Find out more about our dental website compliance >

[contact-form to=’hello@design4dentists.com’ subject=’Generate ROI From Your Website’][contact-field label=’Name’ type=’name’ required=’1’/][contact-field label=’Email’ type=’email’ required=’1’/][contact-field label=’Mobile’ type=’text’/][contact-field label=’Website’ type=’url’/][contact-field label=’Comment’ type=’textarea’ required=’1’/][/contact-form]