Privacy Notice

WorkMed California, APC, doing business as WorkMed California, is an occupational medicine practice treating California workers’ compensation patients. Our treating physician is Kevin Calhoun, MD — board-certified in Emergency Medicine and a Qualified Medical Evaluator (QME).

2440 West Shaw Avenue, Suite 106, Fresno, California 93711
Phone (866) 980-9580 · Fax (559) 228-4040
Office hours: Monday through Friday, 8:30 AM to 5:00 PM Pacific time; closed weekends

When you call our office, and on some calls we place to you, you may speak with an automated AI assistant rather than a person. The assistant answers questions, takes messages, collects intake information, and connects you to staff. It is not a clinician and does not give medical advice.

Calls are recorded. You hear a spoken disclosure at the start of the call before any of your audio is captured. If you do not wish to be recorded, tell the assistant or hang up and contact us by phone during office hours, by fax, or by mail at the address above.

We keep an audio recording and a written transcript of the call. Recordings are stored on our own server, on a disk we control, with file permissions that restrict access to authorized staff. Call audio is not stored with any third-party cloud storage provider.

Every access to patient information through our admin console is logged, and those logs cannot be edited or deleted by the application.

Depending on how you contact us, we may collect:

• Your name, date of birth, phone number, and email address
• Your workers’ compensation claim number, date of injury, employer, insurance carrier, and claims adjuster
• Your attorney or law firm, if you are represented
• The body parts involved in your injury, your symptoms, medications, allergies, and other clinical information you give us
• Audio recordings and transcripts of calls with our office
• The content of text messages you exchange with us, and whether you opened a form we texted you

Clinical information you give the assistant is encrypted individually before it is stored.

If you agree to receive text messages from us, we use your mobile number to send appointment-related information and links to forms you have asked for.

No mobile information will be shared with third parties or affiliates for marketing or promotional purposes. Text messaging originator opt-in data and consent are not shared with any third party. Your phone number and your consent record are used only to deliver the messages you asked for, and are passed only to the telecommunications carrier that delivers them.

We do not sell your information. We do not use your information for advertising. We do not send marketing texts.

You can stop messages at any time by replying STOP. See our SMS Terms & Conditions for full details, including message frequency and rates.

We use your information to treat you, to run our practice, and to get paid for your care. Specifically:

• Treatment — scheduling, clinical care, referrals, and reports required in your claim.
• Payment — billing your claims administrator or insurance carrier.
• Health care operations — quality review of our own assistant, staff training, and administration.
• Workers’ compensation — California law requires disclosure of records relevant to your claim to your employer’s claims administrator, the insurance carrier, and other parties to the claim. This is a normal and legally required part of a workers’ compensation case.
• As required by law — including public health reporting and valid legal process.

We use a small number of vendors to operate the phone system. They act on our instructions and are not permitted to use your information for their own purposes:

• Telnyx — carries our phone calls and text messages.
• OpenAI — provides the speech and language models that power the assistant. Call audio and transcripts are processed through OpenAI’s United States endpoint.
• Google Workspace — used to alert our own staff internally. Patient-facing email is not sent through it; our system is configured so that the assistant can only message addresses inside our own practice domain.

We keep patient records indefinitely, and we do not routinely delete them. This is a deliberate decision, not an oversight.

California workers’ compensation law requires claim files to be kept for at least five years from the date of injury or the date benefits were last provided, whichever is later, and claim files with awards for future benefits may not be destroyed at all. California law separately requires patient records to be kept for at least seven years. Because a claim can be reopened years later, we do not operate an automatic deletion schedule.

Backup copies of our systems are retained for approximately two months, so information removed from our live system may persist in backups until those backups age out.

You have the right to:

• Inspect and get a copy of your records, including call recordings and transcripts we hold about you.
• Request a correction if you believe something in your record is wrong or incomplete.
• Request restrictions on how we use or share your information, though we are not required to agree to every request.
• Get a list of certain disclosures we have made of your information.
• Get a paper copy of this notice at any time, even if you agreed to receive it electronically.
• Stop text messages at any time by replying STOP.

Please note that a request to delete your records is generally not something we can grant. Health care records are not covered by the general “right to be forgotten” that applies to some other kinds of business, and the workers’ compensation retention rules described in section 7 independently require us to keep them. We will always tell you if we cannot honor a request, and why.

To exercise any of these rights, contact monica@workmedca.com or call (866) 980-9580 during office hours.

If you believe your privacy rights have been violated, you may complain to us at drcalhoun@workmedca.com or (866) 980-9580, and you may file a complaint with the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Office for Civil Rights. We will not retaliate against you for filing a complaint.

We may change this notice. Changes apply to information we already hold as well as information we receive in the future. The current version is always posted at https://workmedca.com/legal/privacy, with its effective date at the top.