Privacy Policy

Our commitment to your privacy

Optimal Hearing Solutions protects the personal and health information you trust us with, and uses it only to care for you and run our clinic. We never sell your information.

This policy explains what we collect, why, who we share it with, and the choices you have. It covers our clinic at 380 Alexander St NE, #200, Salmon Arm, BC, and our website, optimalhearingsolutions.ca.

We follow British Columbia’s Personal Information Protection Act (PIPA) and the standards of our regulator, the College of Health and Care Professionals of BC (CHCPBC).

Effective date: October 17th, 2026
Last updated: October 19th, 2026

Who to contact

Our Privacy Officer is Justin Miller, RHIP, owner of Optimal Hearing Solutions. He is responsible for how the clinic handles personal information, and he answers every privacy question and request personally.

Phone: (250) 832-7618
Email: justin@optimalhearingsolutions.ca
Mail or in person: 380 Alexander St NE, #200, Salmon Arm, BC V1E 4H7

You can also ask us for a copy of our privacy practices at any time.

What we collect

We collect only what we need to assess your hearing, provide care, and run the clinic. As a client, that can include:

Contact details: your name, address, phone number and email.
Identity and billing details: date of birth, and insurance or funding information such as a Veterans Affairs Canada, Pacific Blue Cross or private plan number, and your BC Personal Health Number if you provide it.
Health information: your hearing history, relevant medical history and medications, and the results of your tests, such as hearing tests, middle-ear tests, speech-in-noise tests and real-ear measurements.
Hearing aid details: the make, model and serial numbers of your devices, and your fitting, adjustment and repair history.
Payment records: what you paid and how. We never store full credit card numbers in any of our systems.
Our communications with you: appointment notes, emails and messages. Voicemails are delivered to our clinic email.

If a family member or caregiver helps with your care, we record who they are and what you have asked us to share with them.

What our website collects is described below, under “Our website”.

Why we use it, and your consent

We use your information to:

assess your hearing and recommend, fit and adjust hearing aids and other treatment;
book appointments and send reminders;
bill insurers and funding programs on your behalf, when you ask us to;
order, register, warranty and repair your devices with the manufacturer;
keep the clinical records our College requires, and meet our other legal obligations.

We tell you why we need information when we ask for it, and we use it only for those purposes. If we ever want to use it for something new, we will ask you first.

By booking with us and coming in for care, you agree to these everyday uses. For anything beyond them, such as sending results to someone other than your health providers, we ask for your clear permission, and we note your consent in your record.

You can withdraw or limit your consent at any time by telling us. We will explain anything that would change as a result, for example that we could no longer bill your insurer directly.

We may start an email newsletter or similar updates in the future. We will only send them to you if you sign up, and every message will include an easy way to unsubscribe.

We share only what each party needs for its role.

Who	Why	What they receive
Your family doctor or specialist	Referrals and reports, with your consent	Test results and recommendations
Insurers and funding programs (such as Medavie Blue Cross for Veterans Affairs Canada, Pacific Blue Cross, or your private insurer)	Direct billing and pre-approval, when you ask us to	Your name, plan details, the services provided and supporting results
Hearing aid manufacturers and suppliers	Ordering, warranty and repairs	Your name and device details
Companies that run our systems	Our clinic records and online booking (Blueprint OMS), email, phone and website hosting	Only what their service needs, under contracts that require them to keep it confidential
Our College, a court, or others where the law requires	Audits, investigations or legal orders	Only what the law requires

Some of these companies store or process information outside Canada, where it may be subject to the laws of that country. Our website is hosted on Cloudflare’s worldwide network, which delivers it to each visitor from a nearby location that may be outside Canada; the website holds no clinical records. Our email is provided by Hostinger and may be stored outside Canada. Blueprint OMS, which holds our clinic records and online bookings, is hosted on Amazon Web Services and states that it meets Canadian, American and European health-privacy standards. Blueprint has offices in Toronto, Ontario and Eden Prairie, Minnesota, and its data may be stored in Canada or the United States. We remain responsible for your information wherever it is stored.

Our website

Our website does not identify you, and it does not follow you to other sites.

Visitor statistics. We use Plausible, a privacy-focused analytics tool, which we run on our own server in British Columbia. Your visit data is not sent to or shared with any analytics company, and our backups of it are encrypted so that only we can read them. It uses no cookies and never stores your IP address. It records:

which pages are viewed, for how long, and how far down the page;
the website or search engine that sent the visit;
the type of device, browser and operating system;
the approximate city or region, worked out from your connection and then discarded;
when you open our online booking form, follow a link to another website, download a file or submit a form.

Search data. Google Search Console gives us totals of the Google searches that showed our site. It does not tell us who searched.

Online booking. Our booking form is provided by Blueprint OMS (myhearingportal.com) and loads only when you choose to open it. What you enter goes to Blueprint on our behalf, to create your appointment.

Map. The map on our homepage is provided by Google Maps. Google may collect information when it loads, under Google’s Privacy Policy.

Cookies. Our website itself sets no cookies. Our security provider, Cloudflare, sets one cookie named cf_clearance after a quick automatic check that you are a real visitor and not a bot. It is used only for that security check: our pages cannot read it, and we do not use it to track you. It expires after one year, and you can delete it at any time in your browser settings. If you open our online booking form, Blueprint OMS may set cookies of its own.

Security logs. Cloudflare, which hosts our website, automatically records IP addresses and browser details to protect the site from attacks. These logs are kept for a limited time and are not used to identify visitors.

Links to other websites. Our website links to other organizations’ websites. Their own privacy policies apply once you leave our site.

How we protect it, and how long we keep it

We keep your records secure with:

a locked clinic and locked storage for any paper records;
password-protected systems with two-step sign-in where available;
access limited to clinic staff who need it for your care, all bound by confidentiality;
secure, encrypted connections for our website and online booking.

No system is perfectly secure, so we limit what we collect, keep it only as long as required, and review our safeguards regularly.

Clinical records are kept for at least 16 years after your last visit, as our College requires. For clients first seen before age 19, records are kept for 16 years after the last visit or until their 35th birthday, whichever is later. After that, records are securely destroyed.

Website statistics contain no names or IP addresses. We keep them as long as they are useful for improving the site.

If a privacy breach ever puts you at risk of significant harm, we will tell you promptly and explain what we are doing about it.

If our clinic is sold or closes

If Optimal Hearing Solutions is sold, merges with another clinic or closes, your records will be transferred only to another regulated health professional who must protect them under the same rules. We will tell you where your records are going and how to reach them, and you can still ask for access or a copy.

Your rights

See your records. Ask us, and we will give you access within 30 business days. In rare cases the law lets us hold part of a record back, for example to protect someone else’s privacy; if so, we will tell you why. Viewing your records at the clinic is free. For copies, a minimal fee for the cost of supplies and preparation time may apply, and we will tell you the amount before we make them.
Correct your records. If something is wrong, tell us and we will fix it, or note your request in your file if we disagree.
Know who has seen it. Ask us how your information has been used and who we have shared it with.
Change your mind. You can withdraw or limit your consent at any time, as described above.

Deleting your information. You can ask us to delete information we don’t need to keep, such as your email address on our newsletter list or an email you sent us. Clinical records are different: the College requires us to keep them for at least 16 years after your last visit, so we cannot delete them early, but you can always see them and ask us to correct them.

Concerns. Please contact our Privacy Officer first; we take every concern seriously and will reply in writing. If you are not satisfied, you can contact the Office of the Information and Privacy Commissioner for British Columbia: PO Box 9038 Stn. Prov. Govt., Victoria, BC V8W 9A4, (250) 387-5629, info@oipc.bc.ca. For concerns about professional conduct, you can contact the College of Health and Care Professionals of BC.

Changes to this policy

We will update this policy when our practices change, and show the new effective date at the top. If a change affects how we use information you have already given us, we will let you know before it takes effect.