Privacy Policy

In this policy, Virtus Health Group means Virtus Health Pty Ltd and its related bodies corporate (as that term is defined in the Corporations Act 2001 (Cth)). This includes our brands at IVFAustralia, MelbourneIVF, TasIVF, Queensland Fertility Group, The Fertility Centre and Virtus Diagnostics, Virtus Genetics, Virtus Specialist Day Hospitals.  A full list of Virtus Health Group brands is set further below.

At Virtus Health Group, our primary concern is providing you with treatment and healthcare of the highest quality.  This requires a relationship of trust and confidentiality – one where we treat your personal health information appropriately and respect your privacy.  

As such, we will handle your personal information in accordance with this Privacy Policy and in compliance with our obligations under the Privacy Act 1988 (Cth) (Australian Privacy Act) and, to the extent applicable, the European Union's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). In addition, we are an industry regulated by numerous other legislation and regulation which regulate the handling of personal information, including specific regulation relating to assisted reproductive technology.  

Our fertility specialists, nurses, scientists, counsellors and administration staff work together to provide your fertility treatment.  They may need access to your personal health information to make sure we provide the most appropriate care.  

You are entitled to know what personal information is held about you, how you can access it, why it is held, to whom we may disclose it, and when we need your consent to do this.  This policy explains all these details.  You can discuss any issue relating to the privacy of your information with your doctor or any staff member, at any time.  

Collecting information 

Our fertility specialists and staff collect information that helps us provide the level of advice, care and management you need, or where there is a statutory requirement for collection.  

This information may include:  

  • contact details and date of birth 
  • relationship status 
  • medical history 
  • family medical history 
  • details of offspring
  • symptoms, diagnosis and recommended treatment 
  • ethnicity 
  • Medicare/private health fund details, and 
  • billing or account details.  

We normally collect this information directly from you, but we may need to get it from other sources – for example, from other medical practitioners, health funds or health providers and, with your consent, from family members. 

Purposes for handling your information 

To ensure we provide you with the most appropriate treatment, our fertility specialists and staff may collect, hold, use and disclose your personal information for any of the following purposes: 

  • sharing your information within the treatment team;
  • communicating with the referring medical practitioners;
  • follow-up telephone and video-conferencing calls, appointment reminders and recall notices via physical mail, email, electronic messaging or secure online platforms in connection with your treatment and healthcare;
  • obtaining required treatment consents, via physical consents, email or secure online platforms;
  • exchanging information with or obtaining information from referring medical practitioners, including from My Health Record and any public health system information;
  • referrals to other medical practitioners, hospitals, or health care providers;
  • referring specimens to external laboratories for analysis;
  • accounts and billing purposes, including Medicare, private health insurance claims and for the purpose of debt collection;
  • complaints and incident handling and notifications to our insurers;
  • managing our practice, including risk management, quality assurance, licensing and accreditation, market analysis and keeping our records up to date;
  • disclosure to our service providers where necessary for your treatment or for our management and administrative purposes;
  • legal or regulatory related disclosure as required by a court of law or any legislative, statutory or regulatory body (including public interest, notifiable diseases, donor information);
  • research and data analysis under the supervision of a Human Research Ethics Committee under the oversight of the Commonwealth Government’s National Health and Medical Research Council (if required) and future contact to seek your consent about involvement in other research projects;
  • training and teaching purposes involving medical students and/or staff;
  • telehealth consultations and other secure on-line or remote communications involving the provision of healthcare and treatment;
  • newsletters and marketing communications including patient surveys via email or on-line platforms, electronic messaging, and software applications for the purpose of sharing generic health-related information;
  • providing a sample of identifying information for confidential review by regulatory bodies, such as the national Reproductive Technology Accreditation Committee (RTAC), for the purpose of licensing and accreditation;
  • sharing your information, if a serious ethical issue arises in your care, with a clinical ethics advisory committee (which may have members who are not employees of Virtus);
  • submission of de-identified patient and treatment information to be recorded in the Australia and New Zealand Assisted Reproductive Technology Database (ANZARD). This ANZARD information may be used for population analysis, research projects, and the publication of our success rates. This information may be further supplied to other government and statutory bodies, all in compliance with regulatory requirements. In all these cases we remove any information that personally identifies you; and
  • use non-identifying information from your medical file for data analysis and research.

We may also use non-identifying information from your medical file for data analysis and research.  

From time-to-time, we may send you information regarding operational updates, and about our products and services that may be of interest to you. You will be able to opt out of receiving these communications when you receive them or you can contact our privacy officer. 

If you request us to send materials related to your treatment to another country we will be required to disclose your personal information to people in that country. 

We use secure services, hosted in the United States, to manage communications and events. Accordingly, some of your personal information may be securely held by that service in the United States. We use globally hosted (country of storage changes intermittently) secure servers to process some patient and client information for market analysis purposes. 

The diagnosis and treatment of infertility often involves more than one person (for example, your partner, donors or surrogates). Where you are undergoing treatment with a partner, it is our policy to share all your information with your partner UNLESS you tell us not to disclose your information to your partner. 

Overseas transfers of personal information 

We may disclose personal information between our related bodies corporate in Ireland, the United Kingdom, Denmark and Singapore, where permitted under the Australian Privacy Act. 

Data quality and security 

We take all reasonable steps to ensure the personal information we collect, use, hold or disclose is accurate, complete, up-to-date and relevant to the functions and services we provide. You can help us achieve this by providing correct and up-to-date information, as described in our Patient Rights and Responsibilities document.

We store your personal information securely and protect it from unauthorised access, modification or disclosure.  

Access and correction 

In all but a few rare cases, you can access the personal information we hold about you, in part or in full, or ask us to provide it to a third party such as another healthcare provider.  

We may require you to make this request in writing. There may be an administration fee for this service, depending on the nature of access required.  

If you feel any of the personal information we hold about you is inaccurate or incomplete, please let us know.  It is our policy to note your corrections and add them to your records.  In accordance with good clinical practice and consistent with our statutory obligations, we do not erase the original record.  

Cookies, pixels and tags

Our websites use cookies, pixels, tags and similar technologies. These are small pieces of text stored in your browser or small images embedded in webpages that support the following tasks:

  • Basic functions: To help our websites work (for example, remembering which page you are on, or enabling functions like audio or video). We do not collect any personal information when we do this.
  • Analytics: To anonymously log user activity to help us understand how our websites are used, and for security purposes. We use Google Analytics to do this. You can opt out of Google Analytics by visiting the Google Analytics opt-out page
  • Advertising: We work with third-party advertising partners to show our advertising to relevant groups of people on social media and other websites. We use cookies, pixels and tags on our websites to better understand your interests. When you take certain actions, such as submitting a form, we share data with our advertising partners to help us assess how our advertising campaigns are working. This data does not identify you directly, but may include information about your device and browser. Our ad management partners include MetaAlphabet and TikTok - you can control how our partners advertise to you in on their websites.

Remarketing with Google Analytics 

Virtus Health websites use analytics data and the double click cookie to serve ads based on a user’s prior visits to our website. You have the ability to opt out of the double click cookie by visiting the Google advertising opt-out page or by opting out of Google Analytics by visiting the Google Analytics opt-out page

If you would like to know more about remarketing you can view Google’s Remarketing Privacy Guidelines, Policies and Restrictions pages. 

For what purposes do we collect, hold, and use your personal and health information? 

Your personal and health information is collected and used to ensure you can be informed about the services that we provide, that you receive the best possible care if you become a patient of Virtus Health Group, and for us to manage the health services we provide to you effectively. It will also be used for the matters described under “Purposes for handling your information” above, including to: 

  • send communications (including results) to you and your treating doctors 
  • provide information and advice 
  • conduct business processing functions 
  • update our records and keep your contact details up to date 
  • respond to any complaint made by you 
  • comply with any law, rule, regulation, lawful and binding determination, decision or direction of a regulator, or in co-operation with any governmental authority 

It will also be used internally for the administrative, marketing, planning, product or service development, quality control and research purposes of the Virtus Health Group. 

Retention of records 

To ensure we comply with regulatory requirements, it is our policy to keep your medical records for the period required by the relevant statutory requirements. As a regulated provider of assisted reproductive services, we are legally required under relevant Australian State assisted reproductive technology laws to retain patient records for extended periods—often more than 50 years.  

Contact 

We want to make sure your expectations about your privacy protection are the same as ours.  If you have any concerns, please discuss them with your doctor or any member of our staff. If, after this discussion, you still have concerns, you can contact our Privacy Officer at: privacy@virtushealth.com.au or Virtus Health Group Privacy Officer, Level 3, 154 Pacific Highway, Greenwich NSW 2065. 

If you are still not satisfied, you may complain to: 

Privacy Commissioner 

Office of the Australian Information Commissioner 

Level 8, Piccadilly Tower, 133 Castlereagh Street, Sydney NSW 2000 

GPO Box 5218, Sydney NSW 1042 

Privacy hotline 1300 363 992   Website www.privacy.gov.au 

or 

The Office of the Health Ombudsman 

Call: 133 OHO (133 646) 

Email: Health service complaints: complaints@oho.qld.gov.au 

Visit our Make a complaint page for more information on making a health service complaint. 

General enquiries or questions: 

info@oho.qld.gov.au 

Write: 

PO Box 13281 George Street 
Brisbane Qld 4003 

Fax: (07) 3319 6350 

or 

Health Care Complaints Commission 

Level 13, 323 Castlereagh Street, Sydney NSW 2000 

Locked Mail Bag 18, STRAWBERRY HILLS NSW 2012 

T: (02) 9219 7444   Website www.hccc.nsw.gov.au 

or 

Office of the Health Services Commissioner 

Level 30 570 Bourke Street Melbourne VIC 3000 

T: (03) 8601 5200   Website www.health.vic.gov.au/hsc/  

Additional rights of European residents 

Compliance with the GDPR 

We are committed to ensuring we comply with the European Union's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). 
 
Our Privacy Policy explains how we handle personal information under Australian law. We also have some clients and other contacts who are located in the European Union (EU Residents) who have additional rights in respect of their Personal Data. All rights referred to in the Privacy Policy extend equally to EU Residents, and the term "personal information" (as used in the Privacy Policy) should be considered interchangeable with the term Personal Data (as used in this section on additional rights of European residents). 

Under the GDPR, we are primarily a “controller” of Personal Data, as opposed to being a “processor”. As part of our GDPR compliance, we ensure that: 

  • Personal Data is:  
  • processed fairly, lawfully and in a transparent manner; and  
  • collected and processed only for specified and lawful purposes.  
  • Processed Personal Data is:  
  • adequate, relevant and not excessive;  
  • accurate and, where necessary, kept up to date;  
  • kept secure, and not longer than necessary;  
  • not transferred to countries outside the European Union without adequate protection; and  
  • treated in accordance with individuals’ legal rights. 

Access and control 

While we endeavour to provide all customers with appropriate access and control over their data, EU residents may also have the following additional rights: 

  • the right to have your data erased (“the right to be forgotten”). You can ask for your personal data to be deleted where your personal data is no longer required for the purpose for which it was collected, or if your consent for processing your personal data is withdrawn, or if your personal data has been unlawfully processed; 
  • the right to restrict processing of your personal data. You can request a temporary halt to the processing of your personal data; 
  • the right to data portability. You have the right to ask for any personal data supplied to us to be provided in a structured, commonly used and machine-readable format for transfer to another provider; 
  • the right to object to the processing of your personal data. This applies in situations where your personal data is processed in a manner that is inconsistent with the primary purpose for which it was collected; and 
  • the rights related to automated decision making, including profiling. Here, you have the right to not be subject to a decision based solely on automated processing. 

We will allow and assist EU Residents to exercise these rights, unless we have compelling and legitimate legal grounds not to (e.g. a legal obligation under Australian legislation, or if the Personal Data has been fully anonymised). 

Changes to this Privacy Policy 

We may make changes to this Privacy Policy at any time without notice to you.  At any time, our current Privacy Policy is available on our website.

List of Virtus Health Group brands

VirtusFertilityCentre, The Fertility Centre, Aagard, Complete Fertility, SimsIVF, Trianglen Fertility Clinic, Alexandria Specialist Day Hospital, City West Specialist Day Hospital, Mackay Specialist Day Hospital, Melbourne Procedure Centre, North Shore Specialist Day Hospital, Spring Hill Specialist Day, Virtus Diagnostic, Virtus Genetics.