What is the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and why is it important to be compliant?

What is the GDPR?

The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is a legal framework that sets guidelines for the collection and processing of personal information from individuals who live in the European Union (EU). GDPR can be considered as the world’s strongest set of data protection rules, which enhance how people can access information about them and place limits on what organizations can do with personal data. It includes the following rights for individuals, in your case patients. The right to be informed, the right of access, the right to rectification, the right to erasure, the right to restrict processing, the right to data portability, the right to object and also rights around automated decision making and profiling. Therefore, GDPR compliance is important and necessary for all practitioners.

Why GDPR compliance is important for your practice and clients?

As a therapist or doctor, you are dealing with very sensitive data and information. You are responsible for storing your client’s information is secure and third parties have no access to it. Therefore, the EU developed seven key principles which have been designed to guide how people’s data can be handled. GDPR’s seven principles are: lawfulness, fairness and transparency; purpose limitation; data minimisation; accuracy; storage limitation; integrity and confidentiality (security); and accountability. They don’t act as hard rules, but instead as an overarching framework that lays out the broad purposes of GDPR. Any company that does not follow these new norms faces severe fines, potentially up to €20 million or 4% of annual global revenue, depending on the severity and circumstances of the violation. In other words, GDPR compliance is not optional.

How to be GDPR compliant?

As mentioned above ignoring the GDPR is not an option and it is a significant piece of legislation, thus there is a lot to consider when running a clinic or practice. It would go beyond the scope to elaborate on all criteria of the GDPR in this blog post. Therefore, we have created the following page “General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) – does your practice comply?“, which contains information on how we deal with it. It includes a checklist with descriptions for each criterion of the GDPR. You can go through our checklist and make sure that your practice complies with the GDPR. EasyPractice complies fully with the GDPR and some criteria for example ‘Location of data’ require no action from your side because EasyPractice has you already covered.

Conclusion

We, at EasyPractice, take security seriously. It is extremely important that you keep all data technologically and organisationally safe. Therefore, we made sure to be GDPR compliant. We recommend going through our GDPR compliance checklist and make sure you fulfill all requirements. Not only it is important that you store all information and data dealing with your clients safely, but it also should be in your own best interest to prevent severe fines by not ignoring the GDPR.

Do you value safety?

If you are interested to have an online booking platform that takes security seriously, is GDPR compliant, and supports you with security and any other concerns, EasyPractice is the right choice. Receive free access to EasyPractice here to try out our platform that simplifies your daily business.

Our recently released Help centre will guide you through our system and support familiarizing yourself with all functions. Our EasyPractice Support is available to support you and whether you’re a beginner or an expert. They’ve created a bunch of articles to guide you on your way. If you can’t find what you’re looking for, contact our support team.