John Stoddard Cancer Center
1221 Pleasant Street
Des Moines, Iowa 50309
p: 515-241-4141
p: 800-246-8347

Privacy Policy

Collecting and Using Personal Information 
Welcome to John Stoddard Cancer Center's website. We appreciate your interest in us! When you visit and navigate our sites and when you communicate with us via our website, we will not collect personal information about you unless you provide us that information voluntarily. If you provide personal information to us voluntarily via our website, we will not sell, license or transmit that information outside of UnityPoint Health - Des Moines System and affiliated vendors/contractors who are involved in administering or providing services for fufillment of your specific information requests (newsletters and e-health information). We will disclose information in compliance with applicable laws and regulations and will require recipients to protect the information and use it only for the purpose provided.

By "personal information," we mean data that is unique to an individual, such as a name, address, social security number or telephone number. We may request personal information from you at our site in order to deliver requested materials to you, respond to your questions or deliver a product or service.


E-Mail and Asking Questions
First of all, it is important that you realize that any online health services and health information is not intended as a substitute for direct information from a trained medical professional, such as a physician, nurse or caregiver. You should always consult directly with a medical professional for diagnosis and treatment of any specific health problems or immediate health concerns. The information on our website is not medical advice!

We welcome your health-related comments or questions or general questions about our website and have provided e-mail contact opportunities for that purpose. We will share your comments and questions with our customer service personnel (often My Nurse staff, sometimes other clinical staff members) and those employees most capable of addressing your questions and concerns.

Please note that your e-mail, like most, if not all, non-encrypted Internet e-mail communications, may be accessed and viewed by other Internet users, without your knowledge and permission, while in transit to us. For that reason, to protect your privacy, please do not use e-mail to communicate information to us that you consider confidential. If you wish, you may contact us instead via telephone at the numbers provided at various locations on our sites or call the main My Nurse telephone number (1-877-242-8899).

Where you provide information to us using the "Ask a question" form, you will be advised that you are entering a secure transaction area. The information is placed on a secure server and then retrieved by personnel at My Nurse, our 24-hour a day health information and physician referral service. This information transmission is safer than ordinary e-mail. For your reply, please indicate whether you wish us to respond to you by telephone or by your e-mail address to you (please note that such an e-mail reply is not delivered in a secure server environment, hence not private-see notes about regular e-mail, above).

Beyond answering your question, website management personnel will periodically review questions (without patient identifiers or e-mail addresses) to determine if additional information should be placed on the web site that would benefit other patients.

Healthcare Content on this Site
The health care information provided on or accessed from this site has been authored by UnityPoint Health and the staff members and physicians of its affiliates, with the exception of the health care information that has been authored by and purchased from third party vendors including, but not limited to, A.D.A.M., HealthDay and HeartAware, who are responsible for security and quality of information licensed by them.  UnityPoint Health provides health care information for general knowledge and education and this content is not intended as a replacement for advice from your personal physician or direct caregivers.


Registration, Newsletter Enrollment and Personalized Health Information
In one section of this website, "New & Publications", we ask for additional information about you so that we may provide information that addresses your personal health concerns.

We will maintain a database of subscribers to "LiveWell", health news updates and the online health newsletters. You will be asked to confirm that you wish to receive these informational items and may give or withhold permission to receive other information items for specific health interests. This information will be kept in a database and used to deliver the health information you have requested. It will also be combined (aggregated) from time to time to review subscription interests of our patients and community, but will never be sold or transferred to a third-party company for marketing purposes other than our own. As noted above, we occasionally need to have a vendor use this information to fulfill your information requests, but these vendors will also treat the information as confidential per agreements with us.

There are clear directions should you wish to discontinue receiving either "LiveWell" magazine, the e-health newsletters or specific health topic information. Making this change will delete your information from the database that drives the e-mail newsletters and alert a corporate communications staff member to delete your name from the "LiveWell" magazine mailing database.

You must provide permission and check specific healthcare interest areas to receive personalized health information on an ongoing basics.


Information Security
We will use security procedures to protect personal information you submit to us from misuse or unauthorized disclosure. The personal information that you submit to us is stored in a secure database behind an electronic firewall. You can access your personal information only by using a password. We encourage you to change your password regularly and not to share it with anyone.

Access to the data is limited to a few computer technicians for our site who need to maintain the database and who also use passwords for that access, as well as outside vendors who may occasionally assist us in maintaining and improving our hardware and software tools.

John Stoddard Cancer Center will make every effort to safeguard your personal information. However, like other Internet sites, we cannot guarantee that it is completely secure from people who might attempt to evade security measures or intercept transmissions over the Internet.


Other Information/"Cookies"
You should also be aware that when you visit our website, we collect certain information that does not identify you personally, but provides us with "usage data," such as the number of visitors we receive or what pages are visited most often. This data helps us to analyze and improve the usefulness of the information we provide online. We do not collect information about your specific use on the site or track what you view.

We use IP addresses to collect aggregate information about numbers of visitors and site usage. An Internet Protocol (IP) address is a number that is automatically assigned to your computer by your Internet Service Provider (ISP) whenever you access the Internet. This number may be the same each time you access the Internet or it may change. The address is logged on our server when your computer requests information. However, to allow users to access our site anonymously, your IP address is not linked with personal information about you. (We reserve the right, however, to use IP addresses to identify any individuals who threaten our site, service or customers.)

As part of your use of our website, we may use "cookie" technology for our own purposes, or those of our affiliates or partners. A "cookie" is an element of data that a website can send to your browser when you link to that website. It is not a computer program and has no ability read data residing on your computer or instruct it to perform any step or function. By assigning a unique data element to each visitor, the website is able to recognize repeat users, track usage patterns and better serve you when you return to that site. The cookie does not extract other personal information about you, such as your name or address. Most browsers provide a simple procedure that will enable you to control whether you want to receive cookies by notifying you when a website is about to deposit a cookie file. The use of cookie technology in connection with this website may include cookies from IHS, its affiliates, or from a third party vendor (e.g. Google) to monitor site statistics.


Linking to Other Sites
From time to time our website may provide links to other websites, not owned or controlled by UnityPoint Health that we think might be useful or of interest to you. We cannot, however, be responsible for the privacy practices used by other website owners or the content or accuracy of those other websites. Links to various outside websites do not constitute or imply endorsement by UnityPoint Health of these websites, any products or services described on these sites, or of any other material contained in them.


Changes to This Statement 
John Stoddard Cancer Center may change this statement from time to time without notice. We plan to post notice on our home page for no less than a week if any significant changes occur. This privacy statement is not intended to and does not create any contractual or other legal rights in or on behalf of any party.