Privacy Policy

About this policy

Your dental records are among the most personal information you will ever hand to a business. This page explains, in plain language, what Gramercy Dental collects, why we collect it, who we share it with, and what you can ask us to do about it.

Gramercy Dental is a dental practice located at 235 McKenney Avenue, Suite 110, St. Albert, Alberta T8N 7Y3. In this policy, “we,” “us” and “our” mean Gramercy Dental and the dentists, staff and contractors who work on our behalf.

Two Alberta laws govern what we do with your information. Your health information — your dental history, examinations, diagnoses, treatment records, images and the registration details attached to them — is protected under Alberta’s Health Information Act. Dentists are custodians under that Act. Everything else we collect — enquiries through our website, appointment requests, marketing preferences, employment applications — is protected under Alberta’s Personal Information Protection Act. Where our activity crosses provincial or national borders, the federal Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act may also apply.

This policy covers gramercydental.ca, our online booking and contact forms, our email and text communications, our social media pages, and the information we collect when you visit the practice. It does not replace the consent discussions we have with you in the chair about your specific treatment.

What we collect

We collect only what we need to provide your care, run the practice, and meet our professional and legal obligations.

Why we collect it

Every purpose below is one we can explain to you out loud. If we ever want to use your information for something not on this list, we will ask you first.

• To provide your care. Diagnosing, planning, delivering and following up on dental treatment, and keeping an accurate record of it over time.
• To keep you safe in the chair. Knowing your medical history, medications and allergies before we begin anything.
• To reach you. Appointment confirmations, reminders, recall notices, treatment follow-ups and results.
• To bill correctly. Submitting claims to your insurer or to the Canadian Dental Care Plan, processing payments and maintaining financial records.
• To coordinate with other providers. Referring you to a specialist, or corresponding with your physician or another dentist when your care requires it.
• To run and improve the practice. Scheduling, quality assurance, staff training, security, and understanding which parts of our website people find useful.
• To meet legal and professional obligations. Record-keeping periods, regulatory requirements of the College of Dental Surgeons of Alberta, insurance audits and responses to lawful requests.
• To tell you about the practice, where you have agreed to hear from us — newsletters, service updates and community news.

Consent

You are in control of what we do with your information, with a few limits the law sets for us.

When consent is not required. In a small number of situations the law permits or requires us to collect, use or disclose information without your consent — for example, where there is a serious risk of harm, where a court order or subpoena compels us, or where a regulatory body is exercising a lawful power. These are narrow exceptions, not general permissions.

Cookies, analytics and advertising

A cookie is a small file a website stores on your device. Ours do the following.

Turning them off. You can refuse or delete cookies in your browser settings, though strictly necessary cookies will continue to be set. You can also opt out directly:

Do Not Track. Browsers send a Do Not Track signal that has no agreed meaning across the industry, so our site does not respond to it. The opt-outs above are the reliable route.

What advertising platforms know. When we run advertisements, Meta and Google may match an anonymised, hashed version of an email address against their own records to avoid showing our ads to people who are already our patients, or to find people with similar interests. We supply that data in hashed form and we do not supply patient lists containing clinical information for any purpose.

Online booking and forms

When you request an appointment or send us an enquiry, that submission travels over an encrypted connection to our booking provider TRACKER and into our patient management system. Our team reads it; the advertising and analytics platforms described above do not.

If you become a patient, your enquiry becomes part of your health record and is retained accordingly. If you do not, we keep the enquiry only as long as we reasonably need it to follow up with you, and then securely destroy it.

Email and text messages

We treat two kinds of message very differently.

A note on security. Ordinary email and standard text messaging are not fully secure channels. We keep clinical detail out of them, and we ask you to do the same — if you need to discuss something specific about your treatment, call us or raise it at your appointment.

To change how we contact you, email admin@gramercydental.ca or call 587-686-4247.

Who we share information with

We share the minimum amount necessary, with the smallest number of people, for the reasons below — and nothing else.

Our rules for service providers. Anyone handling information on our behalf is bound by a written agreement that limits them to the purpose we engaged them for, requires safeguards at least equal to our own, and prohibits any other use. Where a provider handles health information, Alberta’s Health Information Act treats them as an information manager, with obligations of their own.

You can ask who they are. Contact our Privacy Officer and we will tell you which service providers hold information about you and what they do with it.

Where your information is stored

Your dental records are held in Canada, on systems operated for us under written agreement.

Some of the services behind our website and marketing are operated by companies based outside Canada — analytics and advertising platforms in particular. Information processed by those services may be stored on servers in the United States or elsewhere. While it is in another country, it is subject to that country’s laws, which can include lawful access by foreign courts and government agencies. This is why we keep health information out of those systems entirely.

If you would like to know where a specific piece of your information is held, ask our Privacy Officer and we will tell you.

How we protect it, and how long we keep it

Safeguards. We protect your information with layered measures: encrypted connections for data in transit, access controls that limit each team member to the information their role requires, individual logins rather than shared ones, confidentiality agreements and privacy training for everyone who works here, secured premises and locked storage, and contractual safeguards binding every service provider. No system is perfect, and we would rather tell you that plainly than promise otherwise.

Retention. Dental records are kept for the periods the College of Dental Surgeons of Alberta requires — ten years from the date of the last entry for an adult patient, and ten years past the patient’s eighteenth birthday for a patient who was a minor at the last entry. These periods apply equally to the records of a deceased patient. Financial and insurance records are kept for the periods tax and insurance rules require. Website enquiries that do not become appointments, and marketing contact details after you unsubscribe, are kept only as long as we need them and then destroyed.

Disposal. When a retention period ends, records are destroyed securely — paper by cross-cut shredding or incineration, electronic records by permanent deletion from live systems and backups.

Your rights

You have real, enforceable rights over your information. Using them is not an inconvenience to us — it is how this is supposed to work.

1. See your record. You can ask for access to your health information and to the other personal information we hold about you. Put the request in writing to our Privacy Officer. We respond within 30 days for health information under the Health Information Act, and within 45 days for other personal information under PIPA. A reasonable fee may apply to copying a large record; we will tell you the cost before we start.
2. Correct it. If something in your record is wrong, you can ask us to correct or amend it. Where a clinical observation cannot be changed, we will attach your statement of disagreement to the record.
3. Find out who has seen it. You can ask us for a record of who we have disclosed your health information to.
4. Limit what we share. You can ask us to restrict how your health information is used or disclosed, and we are required to consider your expressed wishes.
5. Stop marketing. Unsubscribe from any message, or tell us directly, and it stops.
6. Take it with you. If you move to another practice, we will transfer a copy of your record to your new dentist at your request.
7. Complain. To us first, so we can fix it — and to the Commissioner if we do not.

We may need to verify your identity before releasing anything, and there are narrow circumstances in which the law allows us to withhold part of a record. If that happens, we will tell you which part, and why.

If something goes wrong

If your information is lost, accessed without authorisation, or disclosed when it should not have been, we will contain it, investigate it and tell you.

For health information, Alberta’s Health Information Act requires us to give notice as soon as practicable — to you, to the Information and Privacy Commissioner of Alberta, and to the responsible provincial Minister — wherever the breach creates a risk of harm. For other personal information, PIPA requires us to report to the Commissioner without unreasonable delay where there is a real risk of significant harm, and the Commissioner may direct us to notify you as well.

Our notice will tell you what happened, what information was involved, what we have done about it, and what you can do to protect yourself. We will not minimise it.

Children and young patients

We treat children, and their records are handled with the same care as everyone else’s.

A parent or guardian normally consents to a child’s treatment and can access that child’s record. Alberta law also recognises that a young person who is capable of understanding their own care and its consequences may consent for themselves — and where that applies, their privacy is theirs, not their parent’s. We make that judgement on a case-by-case basis and will explain it to the family if it arises.

Our website is not designed for children, and we do not knowingly collect information online from anyone under 18 without a parent or guardian involved. If you believe your child has submitted information through our site, contact our Privacy Officer and we will remove it.

We never publish a photograph, video or story involving a child without written consent from their parent or guardian.

Other websites, reviews and social media

Our site links to places we do not control — Google, Instagram, Facebook and our booking provider among them. Once you leave gramercydental.ca, that site’s privacy policy governs, not ours. We would encourage you to read it.

Reviews and comments. Anything you post publicly on Google, Facebook or Instagram is public, and we cannot un-publish it for you. Please do not include clinical details about your treatment in a public review. If you want to raise something specific about your care, call us — that conversation belongs in private, and we would rather have it properly.

When we share your story. We ask for written permission before we use your photograph, video, name or words in any of our marketing. Permission is specific to what we asked for, and you can withdraw it at any time — we will stop using the material in anything we control going forward, though we cannot recall copies other people have already shared.

How to reach us

Start with us. We would far rather resolve a privacy concern directly than have you take it elsewhere first, and we will respond to every enquiry.

If we have not resolved your concern to your satisfaction, you can take it to the regulator. You do not need our permission, and contacting them will not affect your care here.

Concerns about professional conduct or your clinical records can also be raised with the College of Dental Surgeons of Alberta.

Changes to this policy

We review this policy at least once a year and whenever we adopt a new system that handles your information. When we change it, we update the effective date below and post the new version here. If a change materially affects how we handle your information, we will tell you directly rather than relying on you to notice.