West Penn Allegheny Health System has policies in place to protect your personal health information. You can review those policies by clicking here. However, we cannot guarantee that we can protect personal health information that you choose to send to us, via e-mail or otherwise. If you send us personal health information, we will protect it according to our policies as best we can, but we will disclose it to physicians and other health care providers within West Penn Allegheny Health System in order to best address your concerns.

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By choosing to use this West Penn Allegheny Health System site, you acknowledge and agree to the terms of this Disclaimer and Privacy Policy, which we encourage you to read.

The information provided on this site is intended solely to further the public's general knowledge of current developments in the field of medicine and should not be misconstrued or relied upon as advice, diagnoses or opinions regarding any individual's treatment or problem. Nothing should replace the relationship that you maintain with yourw personal physician.

Every effort has been made by the author(s) to provide accurate, up-to-date information. However, the medical knowledge base is dynamic and errors can occur. By using the information contained herein, the viewer willingly assumes all risks in connection with such use. Neither the author nor WPAHS shall be held responsible for errors, omissions in information herein or liable for any special, consequential, or exemplary damages resulting, in whole or in part, from any viewer(s)' use of or reliance upon, this material.

Privacy Policy

We respect your privacy interests and so operate this site by these principles, and we have taken reasonable steps to ensure the integrity and confidentiality of personally identifiable information that you may provide.

You should understand, however, that electronic transmissions via the Internet are notnecessarily secure from interception and so we cannot guarantee the securityor confidentiality of such transmissions.

You may use the WPAHS web site without disclosing personally identifiable information. We want to be clear that we will not obtain such information about you unless you choose to submit it to us. For example, if you email your comments, that identifies your email address. If you request an appointment with a physician, a limited number of hospital administrators and health care providers will see this information and use it to arrange care where appropriate.

The web server of the WPAHS web site collects and saves the default information customarily logged by World Wide Web server software. Our logs contain the following information for each request: date and time, originating IP address and domain name (the unique address assigned to your internet service provider's computer that connects to the internet), object requested, and completion status of the request. We use these logs to help improve our service by evaluating the "traffic" to our site in terms of number of unique visitors, level of demand, most popular page requests, and types of errors.

These logs may be kept for an indefinite amount of time, used at any time and in any way necessary to prevent security breaches and to ensure the integrity of the data on our servers.

Please note that we use "cookies," which are small files stored on your computer's hard drive that are used to track personal information. We may use this information to save username and password data when you are accessing interactive parts of our websites, to allow your web browser to "remember" who you are and assist you by "logging on" without you having to type your username and password repeatedly.

Except for authorized law enforcement investigations or other facially valid legal processes, we will not share any information we receive with any parties outside of WPAHS.