MGH Access Terms & Privacy

The MGH Access App (“MGH Access”) is a resource made available to you by the Massachusetts General Hospital (“MGH”) through the Healthcare Transformation Lab, Referral Management Office and the Lab of Computer Science, all divisions of the Partners HealthCare System, Inc. (“Partners”). MGH Access allows you to easily find, favorite and contact specialty provider practices within the MGH to facilitate referrals and inpatient transfers from the convenience of your mobile phone.

Access and Use

By using MGH Access you understand and agree to the following:

• You will use MGH Access to contact MGH practices to facilitate outpatient referrals and inpatient transfers.
• MGH Access is not designed to be used to address medical emergencies. Please call 911 or your local emergency services in the event of a medical emergency.

Privacy

Your personal information:

“Your information” is the information we request when you initially download and launch the app. It is then accessible from your user profile under ‘Settings.’ This information includes, but is not limited to your name, clinical role, hospital affiliation, and the state in which you practice.  

We also receive other types of information about you that is customarily gathered by web and mobile applications:

• We receive data about you whenever you interact with MGH Access, such as when you launch the application, search for practices, click on, view or otherwise interact with a feature. This may include date and time of the request, the feature requested, and completion status of the request.
• We receive data from the mobile phone you use to launch MGH Access.

How we use your personal information:

Your personal information may be used to support internal operations, including troubleshooting/user support, and service improvements. To ensure you are receiving the highest level of service in your interaction with MGH, your contact information may be used to communicate back with you regarding your requests.

We also use the data to create aggregated statistics which helps us in the improvement of our service.  Aggregated data allows us to evaluate "traffic" patterns to our app in terms of the number and role of visitors, level of demand, most popular requests, and types of errors. These statistics are not linked to any personal information that can identify any individual person.  This data may be kept for an indefinite amount of time, and it may also be used at any time and in any way reasonably necessary to monitor for security breaches and to ensure the integrity of the data on our servers.

Information we share with others:

We do not sell, trade, or otherwise transfer to outside parties any information we receive. However, your information may be shared with employees of MGH and its affiliates, health care providers, researchers and trusted third party partners, who assist us in operating our portals, conducting our business, or servicing you, but only for so long as those parties are legally bound to keep your information confidential. Without access to your information, such parties may not be able to provide you with the full benefits of our portals.

We may release information we collect to judicial, law enforcement or other government agencies when we believe release is appropriate to comply with a governmental or court order, or the law, to enforce our own policies, or to protect ours or others’ rights, property or safety.

We may share aggregate statistics about our visitors, general traffic patterns and app usage with health care providers and practices participating in MGH Access, MGH affiliates and outside parties for marketing purposes, and for purposes of improving our app, site and services. Such aggregate enrollment statistics are not linked to any personal information that can identify any individual person.

How we protect your information:

We make every reasonable effort to protect your information against unauthorized access, alteration, disclosure or destruction using current security technologies. Servers that host MGH Access and store your personal information are maintained in a secured facility behind our firewall. MGH Access security measures are reviewed regularly and are consonant with policies set forth by Partners Information Security. Finally, we restrict access to users’ personal information to our employees, contractors and agents who need to know that information in order to process it on our behalf for purposes of providing you support and services. These individuals are required to attend training on patient privacy and confidentiality and are bound by strict confidentiality obligations.

Deleting Your Account

Your account may be deleted by removing the application from your phone.

Copyright and Proprietary Rights

MGH Access, its features and content are protected by copyright and other intellectual property laws, as well as other state, federal and international laws and regulations. Unless otherwise expressly provided in these Terms of Use, you may print or download information from the app for personal, non-commercial use only, provided you identify the source of the material, include a statement that the material is protected by copyright law, and do not modify any of the information.  Reprinting, or otherwise reproducing, and/or reproducing any document in whole or in part is prohibited, unless prior written consent is obtained from the copyright owner. 

Nothing in these Terms of Use shall be deemed to grant you any right, title, license or interest in or to any software or documentation, or in any related patents, copyrights, trademarks, trade secrets or other intellectual property of any kind, of MGH or its affiliates. We shall have the right to use and incorporate into MGH Access any feedback and input provided by you, for any purpose, including the improvement of MGH Access and other research, educational and patient care purposes.