Privacy Policies
Health Information Portability and Accountability Act
The law was created to give individuals more control and access to their medical information, protect individually identifiable medical information (protected health information) from threats of loss or disclosure, and simplify the administration of health insurance claims and lower costs.
Regulations
Regulations supporting HIPAA punish individuals or organizations that fail to keep patient information confidential and include monetary fines of up to $1.5 million.
Principles
The New Mexico Department of Health operates under these principles:
- Confidentiality — Protected Health Information (PHI) is accessed only by authorized people and processes.
- Integrity — Processes for the transfer and storage of all PHI are secure, ensuring that information is not altered, destroyed or used/disclosed inappropriately.
- Availability — PHI can be accessed as needed by an authorized person.
Policy
The New Mexico Department of Health is required by law to keep your health information private and to tell you our legal duties and privacy practices. Our Health Information Privacy Policy explains what kinds of information we collect, what we do with the information, who else can see your information, what your rights are, how to register a complaint, and more.
Authorization to Disclose Health Information
NMDOH only keeps health records for facilities and Public Health Offices (contact your healthcare provider for all other records). Please use the following HIPAA forms to allow the NMDOH to disclose confidential health information about you:
For questions about disclosure of your health information, contact the NMDOH Chief Records Custodian:
Chief Records Custodian
New Mexico Department of Health
PO Box 26110, Santa Fe, NM 87502
Phone: 505-827-2997 Fax: 505-827-2930
Email: doh-ipra@doh.nm.gov
Learn More
Visit the Health Information Privacy website for a wealth of information about HIPAA.
Contact Us
For questions pertaining to NMDOH compliance with local, state or federal regulations in the information technology security realm, such as HIPAA/HITECH, please visit the Security Office section of our website.
Secure Certificates
In any instance where your personal information is communicated to us, you can be certain that not only are you communicating directly with us, but that it will not be intercepted by anyone. The technology we use to accomplish this is called a Secure Certificate and we purchase our certificates from the Comodo certificate authority.
It's not important that you understand the inner workings of this technology. Simply look for the lock icon in your web browser on certain pages of our site to verify that secure communication is enabled before submitting your personal information to us.
Website Visitor Privacy
We only collecting information that will help us make the site work better for you; let us contact you if you've asked us to, let us give you accurate local information if you need it and give us a sense of how people are using the site, so we can keep improving it.
Information We Collect
We collect the following information from people visiting the website:
- Questions and feedback including your email address, if you send us email
- Your IP address, and details of which browser you use
- How you use our site, using cookies and page tagging techniques
Record of feedback you send us is kept for up to two months before it's deleted.
How We Use Your Information
Any information we collect is used to:
- Improve the content and design of the website.
- Contact visitors (with their permission) to respond to feedback.
We'll never share your information with other organizations for marketing, market research or commercial purposes, and we don't pass on your personal information to any other website.
Connecting to Other Websites
This site contains links to and from websites of government departments and other organizations. We should make it clear that this privacy policy (the one you're reading) only applies to this site.
If you go to another website from this one, please read the privacy policy on that website if you want to know what it does with your information.
Following a Link to Us from Another Website
When you come to our site from another website, we may get personal information about you from the other website. You should read the privacy policy of websites you visit that link you to our site if you want to know about this.
Measuring Website Usage
We use Google Analytics to record how people use our site. We want to make sure it's meeting your needs and to understand how we can improve it.
Google Analytics stores information about what pages you visit, how long you are on the site, how you got here and what you click on. We do not collect or store your personal information, so this information cannot be used to identify who you are. We do not allow Google to use or share our analytics data.
Cookies
We use small data files stored on your computer called 'cookies'. Most big websites do this. To make this site simpler, we sometimes place cookies on your computer.
They improve things by:
- Remembering settings and information, so you don't have to keep re-entering it.
- Measure how you use the website so we can make sure it meets your needs.
Our cookies aren't used to identify you personally. They're just here to make the site work better for you. You can manage and/or delete them as you wish. To learn more about cookies and how to manage them, visit the About Cookies website.