Regarding the Security of E-mail.....
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You will receive a statement of privacy rights on your first visit to our office. These rights were made law by an act of Congress referred to as HIPPA. If you didn't receive this privacy notice, or if you'd like to look at it again, you can find it right here by clicking on one of the following links: Summary of Privacy Practices, which is a 1-page summary of our complete Notice of Privacy Practices. These documents explain the ways in which we can (and cannot) legally use or share certain protected information we obtain from you, so that we can provide medical care for you and/or communicate with your insurance company or other entities involved in the business of providing care for you.
One of our duties as a healthcare provider is to be careful that none of your personal information is shared with those who have no business with that information. One way that personal information can be shared accidentally is through the use of email.
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Should you choose to communicate with us by email, to request a medication refill or an appointment, or to ask a general question, please be aware that regular email is NOT a private, secure form of communication.
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You may think of email as an electronic letter, sealed until the reader "opens" it. Actually, email is more like an electronic postcard, the contents easily readable by anyone who makes an effort to look as it passes through the stops from your computer to various servers and finally, to our office computers.
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So, before you send us an email, think about whether you'd want any Tom, Dick or Mary reading it. If it doesn't bother you, send away. We'll always use encryption if the information we're sending contains sensitive or private information. We think protecting your privacy by using encrypted email is the right thing to do. Even if we didn't, the Federal Government gives us no choice. If all of this sounds like a lot of trouble, we can always communicate "the old fashioned way" 
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