Privacy Notice
1. Introduction & Statutory Authority
PatientCore OS ("PatientCore", registration pending in the Republic of the Philippines, "we", "us", or "our") provides primary care and outpatient clinical operating software designed for healthcare facilities, outpatient departments (OPDs), and multi-specialty practices in the Republic of the Philippines. We strictly adhere to Republic Act No. 10173, otherwise known as the Data Privacy Act of 2012 (DPA), its Implementing Rules and Regulations (IRR), and all circulars issued by the National Privacy Commission (NPC).
This Privacy Notice establishes how personal information and sensitive personal information are gathered, processed, secured, and retained when interacting with our online portals, APIs, and clinical software systems. To request deletion of your data, please see our User Data Deletion Instructions.
2. The Tripartite Healthcare Data Stewardship Framework
In adherence to Philippine healthcare regulations and patient fiduciary rights, PatientCore enforces a structured Tripartite Data Stewardship Framework rather than treating health data as generic cloud vendor property:
- Patient Data Ownership: Individual patients retain exclusive, permanent ownership over their personal medical records, diagnostic reports, electronic prescriptions, and digital passes. Patients hold sovereign rights to export, access, and port their health records in international HL7 FHIR formats at any time.
- Facility Institutional Ownership: Healthcare institutions and clinics maintain sole ownership of their operational workflows, clinical order sets, doctor rotas, fee matrices, and financial accounting ledgers.
- Shared Technological Stewardship: PatientCore and the partner healthcare facility act as joint data stewards. The facility exercises clinical governance at the point of care, while PatientCore acts as technical custodian providing cryptographic isolation (AES-256 / TLS 1.3), tenant schema firewalls, automated backups, and lifetime interoperability.
3. Information We Collect
Depending on your relationship with PatientCore (clinical administrator, physician, allied medical staff, or patient), we collect the following data categories:
- Clinic Partner & Onboarding Data: Names, professional credentials (PRC license, PTR number), official institutional email addresses, mobile numbers, facility names, facility classifications (Solo Practitioner, Group Clinic, Hospital OPD), patient volume metrics, and legacy EMR software environments.
- Clinical & Outpatient Records: Patient demographics, triage vital signs (BP, heart rate, temperature, SpO2), SOAP clinical consultation narratives, ICD-10 diagnostic codes, electronic prescriptions, laboratory and radiology order requests, and professional fee allocations.
- Payer & HMO Pre-Approval Information: Member identification numbers, accredited HMO provider accounts (e.g., Maxicare, Intellicare, Medicard, PhilCare), Letter of Authorization (LOA) policy tokens, and eligibility verification timestamps.
- Technical Telemetry & System Logs: Workstation IP addresses, device user agents, cryptographically signed session tokens, and timestamped immutable audit logs generated during clinical workflows.
4. Purpose and Legal Basis for Processing
Personal data is processed strictly under the principles of transparency, legitimate purpose, and proportionality:
- Clinical Encounter Fulfillment: Enabling accredited physicians and clinic staff to record patient encounters, track vital signs, order diagnostics, and generate prescriptions.
- Payer & HMO Pre-Approvals: Digital staging and queue tracking for HMO pre-approvals without phone hotline delays, and architectural readiness for PhilHealth YAKAP electronic encounter compilation.
- Transactional Care Alerts: Dispatching automated queue status updates, digital passes, and consultation reminders to patients via SMS, Viber, or email upon request.
- Statutory Healthcare Compliance: Fulfilling medical record retention and auditing mandates established by the Department of Health (DOH) and the Professional Regulation Commission (PRC).
Commercial Advertising Prohibition: PatientCore never sells, rents, leases, or distributes applicant contact information or identifiable patient health records to third-party advertisers, commercial brokers, or consumer marketing agencies.
5. Security Controls & Tenant Schema Isolation
PatientCore incorporates defense-in-depth security measures across physical, network, and application layers:
- Strict Tenant Schema Isolation: Each clinic organization operates in an isolated database schema space. Cross-tenant database queries are architecturally blocked.
- End-to-End Cryptography: All communications leverage TLS 1.3 encryption. At-rest databases utilize AES-256 volume encryption with hardware security module (HSM) key management.
- Role-Based Access Control (RBAC): Granular permissions ensure administrative staff cannot access clinical SOAP records. Emergency cross-department lookups require a typed, auditable clinical rationale.
- Automatic Workstation Locks: Inactive clinical screens automatically lock after 5 minutes, requiring rate-limited 4-digit PIN authentication for immediate resumption.
6. Rights of Data Subjects Under RA 10173
As a data subject under Section 16 of the Data Privacy Act of 2012, you hold the following guaranteed rights:
- Right to be Informed: To understand whether personal data concerning you is being gathered, processed, and stored.
- Right to Access: To request reasonable access to your personal records upon identity verification.
- Right to Rectification: To dispute inaccuracies and request prompt correction of outdated or incorrect records.
- Right to Erasure or Blocking: To request withdrawal or removal of personal data, subject to mandatory statutory medical record retention schedules under Philippine law. See our User Data Deletion Instructions for detailed steps.
- Right to Data Portability: To export health records in standardized, machine-readable formats (HL7 FHIR / JSON).
- Right to Damages: To be indemnified for damages sustained due to unlawful, inaccurate, or false personal data.
- Right to File a Complaint: To lodge a formal complaint with the National Privacy Commission (NPC) at privacy.gov.ph.
7. Data Protection Officer (DPO) Contact
To exercise your statutory rights, submit privacy inquiries, or coordinate compliance audits for third-party business services, contact our privacy officer:
PatientCore OS (registration pending)
Email: hello@patientcoreos.com
Official Web Portal: www.patientcoreos.com
Pasig City, Metro Manila, Republic of the Philippines