Privacy Policy Notice

Thank you for visiting the TalkingQuality Web site and for reviewing our Privacy Policy.

The TalkingQuality site was designed for people trying to educate consumers about health care quality. It is intended to help those who are providing consumers with information on the performance of health plans and providers. The site is sponsored by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ), formerly Agency for Health Care Policy and Research, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS), formerly the Health Care Financing Administration, and the Office of Personnel Management (OPM).

We collect no personal information about you when you visit our Web site unless you choose to provide that information to us.

Information Automatically Collected and Stored

When you browse through any Web site, read pages, or download information, certain information about your visit can be collected. We automatically collect and temporarily store the following information about your visit, but this information does not identify you personally:

• The name of the domain you use to access the Internet (for example, aol.com, if you are using an America Online account, or stanford.edu, if you are connecting from Stanford University's domain).
• The type of browser and operating system you use to access our site.
• The date and time of your visit.
• The pages you visited.
• The address of the Web site you came from, if you were referred from another site.

We use this information for statistics on the traffic to our site, to find out about general user interest in various areas of our site, and to help us make our site more useful to visitors.

We track the keywords that are entered into our search engine and the browse terms used to measure interest in specific topics, but we do not monitor which terms a particular user enters.

No additional information is collected about your visit, and we do not record information about individual behavior or use of the site.

Personally Provided Information

You do not have to give us personal information to visit our Web site.

If you choose to provide us with additional information about yourself through an E-mail message, form, survey, etc., we use that information only to respond to your message or to fulfill the stated purpose of the communication. The information provided is handled on a confidential basis within the Agency.

However, E-mail is not necessarily secure against interception. If your message is sensitive, you may prefer to send it by postal mail instead.

All communications to the Web site mailbox and customer feedback form are archived on a monthly basis, and destroyed on an annual basis.

Disclosure

The TalkingQuality site does not disclose, give, sell, or transfer any personal information about our visitors, unless required by law enforcement or statute.

Intrusion Detection

For site security purposes and to ensure that this service remains available to all users, we employ software programs to monitor traffic to identify unauthorized attempts to upload or change information, or otherwise cause damage. Such attempts are strictly prohibited and may be punishable under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act of 1986 and the National Information Infrastructure Protection Act.

Systems of Records

Electronically submitted information is maintained and destroyed according to the principles of the Federal Records Act and regulations and guidance from the National Archives and Records Administration, and in some cases may be subject to the Privacy Act. If information that you submit is to be used in a Privacy Act system of records, there will be a Privacy Act Notice provided.

Links to Other Sites

Our Web site has links to other Federal agencies. We also have selected links to other Web resources. The privacy policy described here does not necessarily apply to those other sites. Once you link to another site, you are subject to the privacy policy of that site.