What personal data we collect and why we collect it

Your privacy is very important to us. At WPBeginner we have a few fundamental principles that we follow:

• We don’t ask you for personal information unless we truly need it. (We can’t stand services that ask you for things like your gender or income level for no apparent reason.)
• We don’t share your personal information with anyone except to comply with the law, develop our products, or protect our rights.
• We don’t store personal information on our servers unless required for the on-going operation of our site.

Sterling Medical operates several websites including sterlingurgentcare.com, sterlinginsurancemd.com and sterlingmedical.net. It is Sterling Medical’s policy to respect your privacy regarding any information we may collect while operating our websites.

Gathering of Personally-Identifying Information

Certain visitors to Sterling Medical’s websites choose to interact with Sterling Medical in ways that require Sterling Medical to gather personally-identifying information. The amount and type of information that Sterling Medical gathers depends on the nature of the interaction. For example, we ask visitors who comment on our blog to provide a username and email address. Those who wish to receive Sterling Medical updates via email, we collect their emails. In each case, Sterling Medical collects such information only insofar as is necessary or appropriate to fulfill the purpose of the visitor’s interaction with Sterling Medical. Sterling Medical does not disclose personally-identifying information other than as described below. And visitors can always refuse to supply personally-identifying information, with the caveat that it may prevent them from engaging in certain website-related activities.

Comments

When visitors leave comments on the site we collect the data shown in the comments form, and also the visitor’s IP address and browser user agent string to help spam detection.

An anonymized string created from your email address (also called a hash) may be provided to the Gravatar service to see if you are using it. The Gravatar service privacy policy is available here: https://automattic.com/privacy/. After approval of your comment, your profile picture is visible to the public in the context of your comment.

Media

If you upload images to the website, you should avoid uploading images with embedded location data (EXIF GPS) included. Visitors to the website can download and extract any location data from images on the website.

Contact forms

We use contact forms as a means of collecting information. If you fill out a contact form, we assume that you are requesting contact with us.

Cookies

To improve your experience on our site, we may use ‘cookies’. Cookies are an industry standard and most major web sites use them. A cookie is a small text file that our site may place on your computer as a tool to remember your preferences.

A cookie is a string of information that a website stores on a visitor’s computer, and that the visitor’s browser provides to the website each time the visitor returns. Sterling Medical uses cookies to help Sterling Medical identify and track visitors, their usage of Sterling Medical website, and their website access preferences. Sterling Medical visitors who do not wish to have cookies placed on their computers should set their browsers to refuse cookies before using Sterling Medical’s websites, with the drawback that certain features of Sterling Medical’s websites may not function properly without the aid of cookies.

If you leave a comment on our site you may opt-in to saving your name, email address and website in cookies. These are for your convenience so that you do not have to fill in your details again when you leave another comment. These cookies will last for one year.

If you have an account and you log in to this site, we will set a temporary cookie to determine if your browser accepts cookies. This cookie contains no personal data and is discarded when you close your browser.

When you log in, we will also set up several cookies to save your login information and your screen display choices. Login cookies last for two days, and screen options cookies last for a year. If you select “Remember Me”, your login will persist for two weeks. If you log out of your account, the login cookies will be removed.

If you edit or publish an article, an additional cookie will be saved in your browser. This cookie includes no personal data and simply indicates the post ID of the article you just edited. It expires after 1 day.

Our website uses Google Analytics, a service which transmits website traffic data to Google servers in the United States. Google Analytics does not identify individual users or associate your IP address with any other data held by Google. We use reports provided by Google Analytics to help us understand website traffic and webpage usage. You can read Google’s privacy policy here https://policies.google.com/technologies/partner-sites

Embedded content from other websites

Articles on this site may include embedded content (e.g. videos, images, articles, etc.). Embedded content from other websites behaves in the exact same way as if the visitor has visited the other website.

These websites may collect data about you, use cookies, embed additional third-party tracking, and monitor your interaction with that embedded content, including tracking your interaction with the embedded content if you have an account and are logged in to that website.

Analytics

We use Google Analytics has access to website usage data.

Who we share your data with

The information we do collect may be used in different ways, depending on your request.

If you log in to our site to pay a bill, we share your information with https://www.patientnotebook.com. Their privacy policy can be found at https://www.patientnotebook.com/Privacy/Index

We also partner with Solve Health to service our patients. You can find their privacy policy at https://www.solvhealth.com/privacy

When you log in to your Patient Portal, the portal is provided by Docutap. Their privacy policy can be found at https://docutap.com/privacy/

How long we retain your data

If you leave a comment, the comment and its metadata are retained indefinitely. This is so we can recognize and approve any follow-up comments automatically instead of holding them in a moderation queue.

For users that register on our website (if any), we also store the personal information they provide in their user profile. All users can see, edit, or delete their personal information at any time (except they cannot change their username). Website administrators can also see and edit that information.

What rights you have over your data

If you have an account on this site, or have left comments, you can request to receive an exported file of the personal data we hold about you, including any data you have provided to us. You can also request that we erase any personal data we hold about you. This does not include any data we are obliged to keep for administrative, legal, or security purposes.

Where we send your data

Visitor comments may be checked through an automated spam detection service.

How we protect your data

Website Visitors

Like most website operators, Sterling Medical collects non-personally-identifying information of the sort that web browsers and servers typically make available, such as the browser type, language preference, referring site, and the date and time of each visitor request. Sterling Medical’s purpose in collecting non-personally identifying information is to better understand how Sterling Medical’s visitors use its website. From time to time, Sterling Medical may release non-personally-identifying information in the aggregate, e.g., by publishing a report on trends in the usage of its website.

Sterling Medical also collects potentially personally-identifying information like Internet Protocol (IP) addresses for logged in users and for users leaving comments on our blogs. Sterling Medical only discloses logged in user and commenter IP addresses under the same circumstances that it uses and discloses personally-identifying information as described below, except that blog commenter IP addresses are visible and disclosed to the administrators of the blog where the comment was left.

Gathering of Personally-Identifying Information

Certain visitors to Sterling Medical’s websites choose to interact with Sterling Medical in ways that require Sterling Medical to gather personally-identifying information. The amount and type of information that Sterling Medical gathers depends on the nature of the interaction. For example, we ask visitors who comment on our blog to provide a username and email address. Those who wish to receive WPBeginner updates via email, we collect their emails. In each case, Sterling Medical collects such information only insofar as is necessary or appropriate to fulfill the purpose of the visitor’s interaction with Sterling Medical. Sterling Medical does not disclose personally-identifying information other than as described below. And visitors can always refuse to supply personally-identifying information, with the caveat that it may prevent them from engaging in certain website-related activities.

Aggregated Statistics

Sterling Medical may collect statistics about the behavior of visitors to its websites. For instance, Sterling Medical may monitor the most popular pages on the list25.com site or use spam screened by the Akismet service to help identify spam. Sterling Medical may display this information publicly or provide it to others. However, Sterling Medical does not disclose personally-identifying information other than as described below.

Protection of Certain Personally-Identifying Information

Sterling Medical discloses potentially personally-identifying and personally-identifying information only to those of its employees, contractors and affiliated organizations that (i) need to know that information in order to process it on Sterling Medical’s behalf or to provide services available at Sterling Medical’s websites, and (ii) that have agreed not to disclose it to others. Some of those employees, contractors and affiliated organizations may be located outside of your home country; (We are located in the United States) by using Sterling Medical’s websites, you consent to the transfer of such information to them. Sterling Medical will not rent or sell potentially personally-identifying and personally-identifying information to anyone. Other than to its employees, contractors and affiliated organizations, as described above,Sterling Medical discloses potentially personally-identifying and personally-identifying information only in response to a subpoena, court order or other governmental request, or when Sterling Medical believes in good faith that disclosure is reasonably necessary to protect the property or rights of Sterling Medical, third parties or the public at large. If you are a registered user of a Sterling Medical website and have supplied your email address, Sterling Medical may occasionally send you an email to tell you about new features, solicit your feedback, or just keep you up to date with what’s going on with Sterling Medical and our products. We primarily use our various product blogs to communicate this type of information, so we expect to keep this type of email to a minimum. If you send us a request (for example via a support email or via one of our feedback mechanisms), we reserve the right to publish it in order to help us clarify or respond to your request or to help us support other users. Sterling Medical takes all measures reasonably necessary to protect against the unauthorized access, use, alteration or destruction of potentially personally-identifying and personally-identifying information.

Business Transfers

If Sterling Medical or substantially all of its assets were acquired, or in the unlikely event that Sterling Medical goes out of business or enters bankruptcy, user information would be one of the assets that is transferred or acquired by a third party. You acknowledge that such transfers may occur, and that any acquirer of Sterling Medical may continue to use your personal information as set forth in this policy.

What data breach procedures we have in place

None

What third parties we receive data from

We do not collect information from any third parties.

What automated decision making and/or profiling we do with user data

We use the information submitted to reach out to those seeking information via contact forms. We use the email subscriptions to share updates about healthcare.

Industry regulatory disclosure requirements

None