Legal
Privacy Policy
If you are in crisis or thinking about harming yourself, call or text 988 (Suicide & Crisis Lifeline), call 911, or go to your nearest emergency room. Do not use this website, the contact form, or email to report an emergency — these are not monitored continuously.
1. Who we are
This website is operated by MK Psychiatry Services — the individual psychiatric practice of Dr. Meenakshi Parmar, MD, licensed in the State of Georgia, USA (“we”, “us”, “our”). This is a solo practice, not a corporate group, and Dr. Parmar is personally responsible for the information described here.
For the purposes of data protection law, Dr. Meenakshi Parmar is the controller of this information.
The best way to reach us about anything in this policy is by email: info@mkpsychiatryservices.com.
2. Scope of this policy
This policy explains what happens to information you provide through this website — principally the appointment request form — and information collected automatically when you visit.
It does not govern the clinical records created once you become a patient. Those are handled under our Notice of Privacy Practices and applicable medical record laws.
3. Relationship to HIPAA
This Privacy Policy is not a HIPAA Notice of Privacy Practices. A Notice of Privacy Practices is a separate document, required by federal law, that describes how your protected health information (PHI) is used and disclosed in the course of treatment, payment, and health care operations. It is provided to you directly when you become a patient.
To request a copy of our Notice of Privacy Practices, contact us using the details in section 15.
Information you send through the contact form on this website travels over ordinary email infrastructure. While the form submission itself is encrypted in transit (HTTPS), email is not a secure channel end to end. Please do not include clinical details, diagnoses, medication lists, or other sensitive health information in the form. Tell us only that you would like an appointment; we will then contact you to gather what we need through an appropriate channel.
4. What we collect
4.1 Information you give us
When you submit the appointment request form, we receive:
- Your name
- Your email address
- Your telephone number (optional)
- Your insurance provider or payment type (optional)
- Your preferred method of contact (optional)
- Whether you are interested in self-pay
- Anything you choose to write in the message field
Because you are contacting a psychiatry practice, the simple fact that you have made contact may itself indicate something about your health. We treat every enquiry as confidential and sensitive accordingly.
4.2 Information collected automatically
- Server logs. Our hosting provider records the IP address, date and time, page requested, and browser user agent for each request, as a standard part of operating a web server.
- Anti-spam records. To stop automated abuse we record the IP address and browser user agent of submissions that our filters block, and we count how many submissions come from an address within a rolling one-hour window. The counter stores a one-way cryptographic hash of the IP address, not the address itself.
4.3 What we do not do
- We do not use advertising or marketing cookies.
- We do not run analytics or visitor-tracking software.
- We do not operate tracking pixels or social media trackers.
- We do not sell or rent personal information to anyone.
- We do not use your information to train artificial intelligence systems.
See our Cookie Policy for detail on the very limited third-party requests this site makes.
5. Why we use it
| Purpose | Information used |
|---|---|
| Responding to your appointment request and arranging care | Everything you submit in the form |
| Confirming insurance or payment arrangements | Insurance provider, self-pay preference |
| Contacting you the way you asked to be contacted | Email, phone, preferred contact method |
| Keeping the website secure and available | Server logs, anti-spam records |
| Meeting legal, regulatory, and professional obligations | As required in the circumstances |
We do not send marketing email. If that ever changes, we will ask for your consent first, and every message will carry an unsubscribe link.
6. Legal bases for processing (GDPR)
We are a Georgia-based practice and our services are offered to people located in the State of Georgia. Where the EU or UK General Data Protection Regulation applies to a visitor, we rely on the following legal bases:
- Steps prior to entering a contract (Art. 6(1)(b)) — handling your appointment request.
- Legitimate interests (Art. 6(1)(f)) — keeping the site secure and preventing abuse. We have weighed this against your rights and consider the impact minimal.
- Legal obligation (Art. 6(1)(c)) — where law or professional regulation requires us to retain or disclose information.
- Explicit consent (Art. 9(2)(a)) — where you voluntarily include health information in your message, which is a special category of personal data. You are not required to provide it, and we ask you not to.
8. How long we keep it
| Record | Retention |
|---|---|
| Enquiry archive stored on our web server | 12 months, then automatically deleted |
| Anti-spam block records | 90 days |
| Rate-limit counters | 1 hour |
| Enquiry emails in our inbox | As long as needed to respond, then deleted or moved into the clinical record |
| Clinical records, once you are a patient | As required by Georgia law and professional obligations |
| Hosting provider server logs | Per the provider's own retention schedule |
If your enquiry becomes part of your clinical record, the medical record retention rules take over and this website policy no longer governs it.
9. How we protect it
- The entire website is served over HTTPS with HSTS enforced.
- Form submissions are validated and filtered on the server.
- The enquiry archive is stored outside the public web directory with restrictive file permissions, so it cannot be reached from the internet.
- Credentials are stored outside the published website files.
- Email is transmitted using authenticated, encrypted SMTP.
- Access is limited to the practice and its authorised website administrator.
No system is perfectly secure. We cannot guarantee the security of information while it travels across the internet to us, which is why we ask you not to send clinical details through this form.
10. Your rights
Depending on where you live, you may have the right to:
- Ask what personal information we hold about you and get a copy
- Have inaccurate information corrected
- Ask us to delete information, where no legal duty requires us to keep it
- Ask us to restrict how we use it
- Object to processing based on legitimate interests
- Receive your information in a portable, machine-readable format
- Withdraw consent at any time, without affecting what we did before you withdrew it
- Lodge a complaint with a supervisory authority
To exercise any of these, email info@mkpsychiatryservices.com. We respond within 30 days. We may need to verify your identity first — particularly for health-related information, where releasing data to the wrong person would cause real harm.
Rights over clinical records, including your right of access under HIPAA, are handled under our Notice of Privacy Practices rather than this policy.
If you are in the EU or UK and believe we have handled your information improperly, you may complain to your national data protection authority. In the United States, you may file a HIPAA complaint with the US Department of Health and Human Services, Office for Civil Rights.
11. US state privacy rights
Residents of California, Colorado, Connecticut, Virginia, and other states with comprehensive privacy laws have rights to know, access, correct, delete, and opt out of sale or targeted advertising.
We do not sell personal information, and we do not process it for targeted advertising, so there is nothing to opt out of. We will not discriminate against you for exercising any privacy right. Use the contact details in section 15 to make a request.
Note that information held by a HIPAA-covered entity as protected health information is generally exempt from these state laws and is governed by HIPAA instead.
12. International transfers
We operate in the United States, and our providers may process data in the United States and elsewhere. If you contact us from outside the US, your information will be transferred to the US, where data protection law differs from that of your home country.
Where GDPR applies, such transfers rely on the European Commission's Standard Contractual Clauses or an applicable adequacy decision, as implemented by the provider concerned.
13. Children's privacy
This practice treats adults aged 18 to 70. The website is not directed at children, and we do not knowingly collect information from anyone under 18. If you believe a child has submitted information to us, contact us and we will delete it.
14. Changes to this policy
We may update this policy as our practice or the law changes. The effective date at the top always reflects the current version. If a change materially affects how we handle your information, we will make that clear on this page.
15. Contact us
Questions about this policy, or about how we handle your information:
MK Psychiatry Services
Dr. Meenakshi Parmar, MD
Email: info@mkpsychiatryservices.com
See also our Terms of Use and Cookie Policy.