Privacy Policy

Bal Dental Centre(“we”, “us”, “our”) operates the dental practice at 4 Greystone Walk Dr #4, Scarborough, ON M1K 5J2 and the website at baldentalcentre.com. This policy applies to both — the information you give us in the office, and the information collected when you visit this website, call us, or submit a form.

We handle your information in accordance with Ontario’s Personal Health Information Protection Act, 2004 (PHIPA), which governs health records held by dental practices, and Canada’s Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (PIPEDA), which governs the rest. Where the two differ, we apply whichever gives you more protection.

Our dentists and staff are also bound by the confidentiality standards of the Royal College of Dental Surgeons of Ontario (RCDSO), which apply independently of this policy.

Information you give us directly

• Through our booking and contact forms: your first and last name, phone number, email address, and whatever you choose to write in the message field.
• When you call us: your phone number, the reason for your call, and any details you share with our front desk.
• When you become a patient: your date of birth, address, emergency contact, medical and dental history, medications, allergies, and dental insurance or benefit plan details (including CDCP, NIHB or ODSP coverage, where applicable).
• During treatment: clinical notes, X-rays and images, treatment plans, consent forms, and payment records.

Information collected automatically

Like most websites, this one records technical details when you visit: your IP address, browser and device type, the pages you view, how long you stay, and the search term, link or ad that brought you here. This is collected through the measurement tools listed in section 4 and is used in aggregate — we are looking at traffic patterns, not at you individually.

• To book, confirm, reschedule and remind you about appointments.
• To assess, plan and provide your dental treatment, and to keep the record of it that we are legally required to keep.
• To submit claims and communicate with your dental insurer or benefit plan, with your consent.
• To process payments and manage our accounts.
• To answer the questions you send us and follow up on enquiries.
• To send practice updates, recall notices or promotions — only where you have agreed to receive them, and always with a way to unsubscribe.
• To understand how the website is used so we can make it more useful.
• To meet our legal, regulatory and professional obligations, including those of the RCDSO.

We do not use your information for automated decision-making, and we do not build advertising profiles about you.

Cookies are small files a website stores in your browser. We use them to keep the site working, to measure traffic, and to understand which marketing actually brings patients through the door. Here is every third-party service this site loads:

Turning them off. Every major browser lets you block or delete cookies in its settings. You can opt out of Google Analytics specifically using Google’s browser opt-out add-on. Blocking cookies will not stop you from booking an appointment or reaching us, though parts of the site may behave less smoothly.

We never sell, rent or trade your personal information. We disclose it only in these situations:

• Within your circle of care — to specialists, laboratories, imaging clinics or other health care providers involved in your treatment, so they can do their part of it.
• To your insurer or benefit plan — to obtain a pre-determination or submit a claim on your behalf, with your consent.
• To service providers who work for us — practice-management software, appointment reminders, hosting and the tools in section 4. They may only use the information to provide that service to us, and are bound by confidentiality obligations.
• Where the law requires or permits it — for example a court order, a mandatory report of suspected child abuse or neglect, or an RCDSO investigation.
• To someone you authorise — a family member, substitute decision-maker or another practice, once you have told us in writing.

Some of our service providers store data on servers outside Canada, including in the United States. While information is held in another country, it may be accessible to that country’s courts and law enforcement under its own laws. We choose providers who commit to protecting it to a standard comparable to ours.

Under PHIPA, we act as the health information custodian for your dental record. In practice that means:

• Implied consent. When you come to us for care, we may share what is needed with other providers in your circle of care without asking each time — that is what lets a referral or a lab prescription work.
• Express consent for everything else. Any use outside your care — marketing, research, fundraising or release to a third party — requires your explicit agreement first.
• Your “lock-box” right. You may instruct us to withhold all or part of your record from other health care providers. Tell us and we will flag it. We will let the receiving provider know that information has been withheld, and we will explain any clinical risk that comes with the restriction.
• Notification if something goes wrong. If your health information is lost, stolen or accessed without authorisation, we will notify you at the first reasonable opportunity and report to the Information and Privacy Commissioner of Ontario where PHIPA requires it.

• Paper charts and any printed information are kept in locked storage in a secured area of the office.
• Electronic records sit behind access controls, and staff accounts are limited to the information each role actually needs.
• This website is served over HTTPS, so what you type into our forms is encrypted in transit.
• Our team is trained on confidentiality when they join and is bound by it for as long as they work with us — and afterwards.
• Records that have reached the end of their retention period are destroyed by shredding or secure deletion, never by ordinary disposal.

No system can be guaranteed perfectly secure, and email in particular is not a secure channel. For anything confidential, please call us or speak to us in the office rather than emailing it.

Ontario’s regulatory requirements set the floor. We retain dental records for at least ten (10) years from the date of the last entry in the record. For a patient who was a minor, the ten years runs from the date they turned eighteen. Financial records are kept for the period required by the Canada Revenue Agency.

Enquiries that never become appointments are kept only as long as needed to follow up, then deleted. Website analytics data is retained according to the settings of the tools in section 4 and is not linked to your dental record.

• Access. You may request a copy of your record. We will respond within 30 days, and will tell you in advance if a reasonable cost-recovery fee applies to copying or transfer.
• Correction. If something in your record is inaccurate or incomplete, tell us and we will correct it. If we disagree, you may have a statement of disagreement attached to the record.
• Withdrawing consent. You may withdraw consent for a use or disclosure at any time, subject to legal limits and to the practicality of continuing your treatment. We will explain any consequence before you decide.
• Opting out of messages. Every marketing email we send has an unsubscribe link. You can also ask our front desk to change how we contact you — email, text or phone — for reminders.
• Transfer. If you move to another practice, we will send your record to your new dentist on your written request.

We may need to verify your identity before acting on a request, and in narrow circumstances the law allows us to refuse access — for example where disclosure could reasonably be expected to cause serious harm. If we refuse, we will tell you why and how to challenge it.

This website is not directed at children, and we do not knowingly collect information online from anyone under 16. Appointments for children are booked by a parent or guardian, who provides the relevant information and consents to treatment. In Ontario, a capable person of any age may consent to their own care; where a young patient is capable of consenting, their privacy rights over that record are their own.

Our site links out to places we do not control — Google Maps, our Facebook, Instagram and YouTube pages, review platforms, and insurer or government pages such as the CDCP and NIHB. Once you follow one of those links, that site’s privacy policy governs, not ours. We would encourage you to read it before entering personal information there.

We may update this policy as our practice, our tools or the law change. The revised version takes effect when it is posted here, and the “last updated” date at the top of the page will change with it. For a change that materially affects how we handle your health information, we will make a point of telling you directly.

Questions about this policy, or a request to see, correct or restrict your record, should go to The Privacy Officer at Bal Dental Centre:

We take complaints seriously and will investigate every one. If you are not satisfied with how we have handled your concern, you may escalate it:

• For health information — the Information and Privacy Commissioner of Ontario, 1-800-387-0073.
• For other personal information — the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada, 1-800-282-1376.