Terms and Conditions
Last Revised: 6/4/08
At change:healthcare, we want to make healthcare easier to understand by promoting transparency – making sure all of the information is available and as simple as it can be with no hidden agendas. It’s what we’re about, so we can be nothing less than completely transparent ourselves. We know just how personal your health can be and it is vitally important to us that you feel comfortable using our site and sharing your experiences.
That said, this page lays out our privacy policy and our terms and conditions in plain language. We made them easy to read and transparent. You need to read them because by accessing the site, you are agreeing to them. If you don’t agree with them, don’t use the site. We had something previously that was crafted and approved by our attorneys. It was extensive (read: long-winded) and comprehensive (read: even we didn’t understand all of it). So we ditched it. This is what we’ve put in place instead. Our attorneys think it’s kind of cute and are refusing to speak to us ever again. For now, we are locking the lawyers in the closet and rewriting things the way we would want to read it.
change:healthcare does not give medical advice. We’ve never even so much as played a doctor on television.
Any of the content – text, graphics, images, pictures and any other material in this site – is for informational purposes only and is not intended as a substitute for professional medical advice diagnosis or treatment. You should always seek the advice of your physician or other qualified health provider with any questions regarding a medical condition. That content is either ours or our partners. That means it’s copywrite and/or trademarked. It’s our intellectual (try to stifle the laughter please) property. Savor it. Enjoy it. Just don’t take it and repurpose it. Don’t scrape it. Don’t steal it.
We’re all about your privacy. Rest assured, we don’t sell your personal information to anyone – ever – not for any reason. We will never tell anyone about your or your family’s health issues. We simply don’t do that. You can even browse the site all you want without giving us any information at all.
We store our own personal information in this system, too, so we mean it when we say we treat your information as our own. We do not require personal identification information other than an e-mail, display name (read: username) and password. We suggest that you use nicknames and not real names for your display name. For example, use “granddad” and shy away from “Jim Bob Doe, Jr. of Franklin, TN.” All other personal information is purely voluntary. This extra data is private by default and only made public if you make it so within our privacy settings.
Now about the e-mail address you give us; we will use it to communicate with you. Only change:healthcare will use it to communicate with you. We will not give it to anyone else – ever. If you don’t want to get e-mails from us, you can even opt out of receiving communications from change:healthcare from your profile settings page.
What we do do (that sounds bad, but it’s grammatically correct…and we have the collective sense of humor of six year olds) is we aggregate data. Yeah, we used a big word that may be kind of unclear. To put it simply, we gather information from a lot of different places. From the government. From insurers. From providers. From you and lots of other people like you. And from lots of other places. We put it into a common format, and we use that data to support transparency in healthcare through displaying it on our site. All of that data is ANONYMOUS and DEPERSONALIZED – that means, there is nothing presented that can be tied specifically to you. The only time any information may be disclosed is if we were forced to by law but that would only be in extremely rare cases. In fact, you can change your personal information at any time. The new information will replace or supplement your previous information.
We may provide this anonymous data to other third parties (“third parties” means besides you and change:healthcare). Those third parties include other change:healthcare users, doctors, clinics, hospitals, pharmacies, or any host of healthcare industry folks.
That’s good for you. How?
Well, as hospitals, doctors, pharmacies, etc. compete for your dollar, our data helps them tailor their business to serve you better. It lets them know what services they should be offering. It guides them to provide more of what you need and it forces them to be competitive on price and quality of service. You benefit because you can see their pricing and those providers who overcharge will have a tougher time getting away with it. You might remember how stocks used to be traded and it was expensive for each trade? Now you can make trades for a few bucks. The system got opened up to consumers…and that’s just what we’re trying to do with healthcare.
Sometimes we do find people who are waaaay smarter than us (that’s not hard to believe), and we wind up asking them to help us process data. That may require us to pass personal information to them for the purpose of processing. But not to worry, they are bound by the same policies we are with you (in fact, we ask them to agree to much more stringent policies), and the work they do gives you a better product.
If you want to “fat finger” your information (that’s a geeky term that implies that you are manually keying it in), we don’t charge you. That’s our basic service plan for now. In the future, we will allow people to pull information in from their insurance company and their bank accounts if they want, and we even have some providers who will put their billing information into our application. We may charge a nominal fee for bringing the data in automagically (the attorneys think we should say “we reserve the right” to do that – sorry, we can’t hear them too well through the closet door). If you really like what we’re doing, tell your employer. They may be able to get your insurance info into our system. If we do charge for any services in the future, your credit card and billing information will never be stored on our servers without your permission.
Naturally, change:healthcare has taken every possible precaution to protect your data. We use encrypted connections when you are visiting the site to protect your information. As security evolves, change:healthcare will continue to take every measure possible to protect you.
At change:healthcare, we have a lot of employees that are parents, and we know exactly how dangerous the internet can be for children. With that in mind, change:healthcare will never knowingly request personal information from anyone under the age of 13 without parental consent.
Speaking of children, we should mention cookies, but not the edible kind – the kind in your browser. Cookies store little tidbits of information locally on your computer. Yes, we use them. It makes life easier in terms of letting you access many of the cool and useful features of the site without logging in for every visit. So be sure you log out when you are done, especially if you are in a shared computer environment. Some of our advertisers may also install cookies (ours have chocolate chips and taste better) if you click on or view their ads. Set your browser to notify you if you want to know when they are being used. To further protect your privacy, we will never store your IP address with any of your user data.
If change:healthcare merges, gets acquired or sells a substantial part of the company, the data we have may become part of the assets managed under the new corporation (Is it terribly obvious that the attorneys got out of the closet and inserted that line?).
If we have to change our terms and conditions, we will let you know. We’ll e-mail you the new agreement and/or we’ll ask you to reaffirm that you are in agreement with our terms and conditions the next time you log in.
And as we have all learned through one experience or another, sometimes people are not exactly who they say they are (he looked like a woman, for goodness sake). We cannot guarantee the identity of any of our other users or the accuracy of their data, so exercise caution in that regard. If we catch a user entering intentionally misleading or inaccurate information, we have the right to inactivate or otherwise disable their account. Stoning is out of the question, but we thought about it.
Finally, we are located in Nashville, Tennessee. It’s a beautiful place and you really should come tour the homes of the country music stars (I saw Joe Diffie the other day and John Rich of Big ‘n’ Rich lives just a short walk from our offices). Let us know if you do. That said, for our own protection, if you have a gripe or a beef with us, we would prefer to resolve it with an exchange of e-mail or phone calls. If it’s just not getting worked out and you feel that you have to take us to court, well, like we said, we’re in Tennessee. So by agreeing to our terms and conditions, you’ve agreed that you won’t take us to court (“seek legal remedy” – attorneys [sigh]) anyplace other than in Nashville, Tennessee.
So we think that covers it. That’s the extent of our agreement. No other warranties and we limit our liability to the price paid for the service. We hope we’ve been perfectly clear if a little long-winded. If you have any questions, we’ll be glad to answer them. Hit the "contact us" link you’ll find at the