How should a fertility clinic protect your personal data in the GDPR era?

The digital era is responsible for the groundbreaking transformation of the healthcare industry. During this transformation however more and more data breaches are being noticed worldwide challenging healthcare companies to rise above this situation.

The main problem healthcare companies are facing at the moment is managing the constantly increasing data volume and flow. The solution to this problem lies in establishing the right risk management framework. This can only be achieved by following the established data regulations and enforcing high-quality standards to implement such data protection principles.

All European companies are nowadays required to follow the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) which is a set of regulations primarily aiming to offer all individuals control over their personal data. However, each company individually has to set technical and organizational measures that would allow them to enforce these principles.

All procedures designed to process personal data must be created with privacy in mind. The privacy settings must be the highest possible and the database cannot be publicly accessible and provide any subject identification. Data processing should only be performed under one out of the six valid lawful bases set in the GDPR regulation (consent, contract, public task, vital interest, legitimate interest or legal requirement). Moreover, any occurring data breaches should be reported to the national supervisory authorities and the affected patient within 72 hours.

As stated above the main purpose of GDPR is to ensure that the patient has control over their data hence the individuals can exercise the following rights:

• The right to be informed regarding the data the company will collect and how they will be used.
• The right of access to their personal data.
• The right to rectification of inaccurate or incomplete data.
• The right to erasure or as otherwise known as the right to be forgotten.
• The right to restrict processing.
• The right to data portability.
• The right to object to processing.
• The rights in relation to automated decision-making and profiling.

At Newlife IVF Greece your data protection is a priority. As a clinic, we are true believers in Quality Management to ensure the consistency of our services and prevent security vulnerabilities. All staff members receive initial training to be educated on all security-related processes, they have access only to information necessary to complete their job and dual-factor authentication is used to access all our systems. Furthermore, we keep our employees updated on the best data protection policies by attending industry conferences and performing annual evaluations to see where we stand and how we can improve.

Our philosophy is to aim for high quality care pre and post treatment and our primary goal is to treat you and your sensitive data with respect and integrity.