Who We Are

This Privacy Policy describes the practices of the District of Columbia Hospital Association, its subsidiaries and affiliates (referred to as a group as “DCHA”) regarding past and ongoing collection and use of information from visitors to our websites and users of our other Internet services. By visiting an DCHA website including but not limited to www.dcha.org, you are accepting the practices described in this Privacy Policy. Our website address is: www.dcha.org.

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 (if uploaded by user) 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.

Information We Collect and How We Use It

DCHA collects information from several sources. Our Web server automatically collects the domain name and Internet Protocol, or IP address for each visitor to our websites. We collect information about the usage of our websites. In addition, we may request or require you to provide personally identifiable information and/or create an account in order to access certain services or engage in certain activities on a website. The information collected depends on how you choose to use our services and our websites, as detailed below.

A. Commonly Accepted Practices
Information collected may be used for commonly accepted practices, including:

1. Product service fulfillment, such as the use of addresses for shipping and credit card information for payment
2. Sending electronic publications to online subscribers
3. Administration of our websites and monitoring usage of our websites
4. Internal operations, such as the use of identity-verification technologies, and the review of server logs
5. Legal compliance and public purposes, such as subpoena compliance and credit reporting
6. Registration and participation in DCHA products, services, and communities
7. Marketing of products and services to you by DCHA

B. Information Collected to Create an Account
There are times when DCHA may request or require you to create an account with us in order to obtain certain services. In such cases we may collect user name or ID and password information from you. We use this information to verify users’ identities in order to prevent unauthorized access to users’ personal information.

DCHA allows account holders to elect to have the website remember their login information for 90 days so they do not have to log in each time. This is done by checking a box labeled “remember my login information for 90 days” on the login page. This feature requires the placement of a small text file called a cookie (see next section) on the user’s hard drive. The cookie tells the site that the user has logged in before. As part of registering for some of DCHA’s products and affiliates, we may collect contact and demographic information such as your name, address, email address, etc. Certain information may be required in order to complete the registration process.

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 visit our login page, 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.

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.

Who We Share Your Data With

If you request a password reset, your IP address will be included in the reset email. In addition to the information sharing described elsewhere in this Privacy Policy, DCHA shares personal information with DCHA affiliated organizations and other trusted businesses or persons to perform functions on our behalf. These third parties have access to personal information needed to perform their functions but may not use it for other purposes. In the unlikely event that DCHA or one of its affiliated organizations is acquired, or substantially all of the assets of DCHA or one of its affiliated organizations are acquired, by a third party either in a sale, bankruptcy court proceeding or otherwise it is possible that personal information of website users and customers would be one of the assets transferred. In such an event, DCHA would take reasonable steps to require the third party to maintain our privacy policies and practices.

In addition, DCHA may disclose personally identifiable information to third parties, but only:

• To contractors we use to support our business, provided they only use the personally identifiable information for DCHA purposes
• To respond to law enforcement requests, where required by applicable laws, court orders, warrants, subpoenas (whether civil or criminal) or governmental regulations
• In situations involving threats to the physical safety of any person
• In connection with joint ventures with third parties
• As necessary to enforce our rights in connection with the website

How Long Do 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.