WikiHealthCare Privacy Policy

The Joint Commission is committed to protecting the privacy of all registered users of the WikiHealthCare site. The Joint Commission has prepared this privacy statement in order to tell you what information we collect about you and your use of the WikiHealthCare site. We urge you to read this policy. The following are our information gathering and dissemination practices for this site.

Personal Information

The Joint Commission established the WikiHealthCare site as an online collaborative environment for health care professionals working within the field of quality and performance improvement. In other words, it is a voluntary association of individuals and groups working together to develop a common resource of healthcare knowledge. By registering on this site, you are indicating a willingness to be identified within that community. For this reason, your name, affiliated institution and country which are collected at the time of registration, will be made available to all registered users of WikiHealthCare. No sensitive information such as social security numbers or credit card information is sought or desired for any part of the registration. However, the ability to identify users within the community is critical to the success of the project, as the structure of the site enables and encourages registered users to alter site content. The ability to accurately identify users promotes transparency within the community and fosters a sense of responsibility and accountability for posted content. It is for these identified purposes that your name, organization and country will be collected, used and retained on WikiHealthCare.

You have a choice as to how much additional information you may wish to provide to your online collaborators. Users may elect to provide additional information (e-mail address and other contact information, educational background, professional experience, research interests, conflict of interest information, etc.) by modifying their user page, which is assigned to each user at the time of registration. Should you do so, the additional information will be available to all users. Such information may be used to enhance user credibility and promote collaboration, so users are encouraged to share such information. In the interests of privacy, however, the default setting for all user signatures is to share only the minimally required information (name, affiliated institution and country). If you do not wish any additional information to be made available to other users, do not add it to your user page.

In the course of site operation, personal information collected by The Joint Commission as part of the registration process may be stored and processed in the United States or any other country in which The Joint Commission or its agents maintain facilities. The Joint Commission may collect, hold, and use, directly or through its affiliates, contractors, successors, assigns, and agents, the personally identifiable information you submit through the site.

The Joint Commission may monitor, edit, or disclose your personal information, if required to do so in order to comply with any valid legal process or governmental request (such as a search warrant, subpoena, statute, or court order). All data collected by or on behalf of The Joint Commission relating any use of the site or its content by any users is and shall remain at all times the sole property of The Joint Commission. You may however, and are encouraged to do so, access the user page and verify or update the information at any time in order to ensure the accuracy of this data.

We may use non-personal information for research purposes, and may provide this informaiton in the aggregate to third parties. For example we might inform third parties regarding the number of users to the WikiHealthCare site and the activities conducted while on site.

We may contract with other companies or individuals to help us provide services, such as development or maintenance of the site. We require others to comply with the Privacy Policy and limit their access to only personal information this is necessary to accomplish the task at hand and nothing more.

Unless otherwise specified above, your personal information will not be provided to any third parties.

E-mail addresses

Individuals who register for use of the WikiHealthCare site are required to provide their e-mail addresses as a means to verify their affiliation with an organization. These e-mail addresses are also used to provide users with updates related to the site. The e-mail addresses collected during the registration process will not be sold, rented, or lent to a third party for any other purpose. E-mailed updates may contain advertising, and such advertising may be "targeted" based on demographic information, e-mail domains, or zip codes. Such targeting is done through processes internal to The Joint Commission and information from registration is not made available to advertisers or anyone else outside The Joint Commission.

User names and passwords

Each subscriber who registers to use this service has a user name and password. Subscribers may choose their own user names and passwords, although whenever possible, user names should incorporate the user's actual name. Passwords are the private property of the user. For reasons of security and privacy, The Joint Commission does not give out passwords to anyone. If you forget your password, you can reset it from your computer. If you forget your user name, you can send yourself an e-mail reminder (sent to the e-mail address through which registration was confirmed). As a user, you are responsible for not sharing your user name and password.

Web Cookies

The Joint Commission uses cookies for site navigation only. "Cookies" are bits of text data sent from a Web server to a user's computer to be retrieved later for purposes of identification. WikiHealthCare only uses temporary cookies, which are deleted at the end of each user session. Many consider the use of cookies to be an industry standard. Consequently, your Web browser is probably set to accept cookies. If you would prefer not to receive cookies, you can alter the configuration of your browser to refuse cookies. If you choose to do so, however, you should understand that it is possible that some areas of our site will not function properly when you view them. Unless otherwise specified, no additional information will be collected from or about you through the use of cookies.

Security Policy

This site has security policies and technology in place to protect the loss, misuse, and alteration of the information under Joint Commission control. This includes User Personal Information. We cannot however protect against User misuse, loss, or alteration of User's own information. Although The Joint Commission makes every reasonable attempt to secure your information, there is always some risk in transmitting information across the internet. We cannot guarantee that the personal information we collect will never be disclosed in some manner not consistent with this Privacy Policy. We also cannot protect against User misuse, loss, or alteration of any User editable content.

Links to other sites

The WikiHealthCare site contains links to other websites. The Joint Commission is not responsible for the privacy practices or content of those sites. Please be aware that the information you provide on any of those linked sites will not be governed by this Privacy Policy.

Public forums

This site operates as a public forum. As such, users should recognize that any information that is disclosed within WikiHealthCare is public.

Contacting The Joint Commission

If you have any questions about this privacy statement, the practices of The Joint Commission, or its WikiHealthCare site, or wish to provide information about a violation of this Privacy Policy or any other aspects of this Web site, please contact:

TWikiAdmin@jointcommission.org

The Joint Commission reserves the right to change this Privacy Policy at any time. Should we do so, the new policy will be posted to this site and the last updated date and time will be identified at the bottom of the policy. Your continued use of this site constitutes your acceptance and agreement to comply with this Privacy Policy.