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How can I ensure the privacy of my dog's information?

Your medical information is protected by HIPAA, an act of Congress that provides rules to ensure the security and confidentiality of your health information. Washington state and most other states have laws preventing public disclosure of veterinary treatment records.  Paw Print Genetics adheres to this law. After accurate and reliable genetic results, privacy should be the number-one concern of any laboratory. At Paw Print Genetics, we take your personal information very seriously and this includes the genetic results of your dogs and we try our very best to protect your privacy.  Although there are no privacy laws governing dogs and their genetic information, we have implemented the following procedures to try to protect your information as much as possible.  We have a strict internal privacy policy that instructs our employees on how personal information collected on our website or obtained through testing of your dogs is handled. This information belongs to the person who ordered and paid for the test. The dog's laboratory results can only be communicated to the person who ordered the test or persons assigned as Contacts on an account or Co-owners of the dog. In most cases it is the owner or breeder. In other cases, it may be a veterinarian. When a person calls our laboratory and wants to discuss a dog's result, we first verify that it is the individual that ordered the test. If it is not the individual that ordered the test, we require permission from the original customer and may require a medical release form to be signed by that original customer, releasing the information to the third party.  It’s that simple. We will not release your dog’s information to a third party without your written consent. If you have any concerns about our Privacy Policy, please contact us. Although the law protects you from us disclosing information on your dog to another party, it also provides that Paw Print Genetics owns the results of any testing generated by us and the DNA extracted from samples received by Paw Print Genetics for analysis.  Thus, Paw Print Genetics reserves the right to use the DNA extracted from your sample at the discretion of Paw Print Genetics in cases of, but not limited to, disputed results, client misconduct, or suspected fraud and to discuss the results with all parties involved.