Is your chiropractic website compliant? Review key requirements for privacy notices, Good Faith Estimates, Section 1557, cookies, security, and upcoming ADA accessibility deadlines. Stay informed and protect your practice!
Transcript:
We’ve taken some phone calls lately about websites and what compliance requirements do you have for your website? What do you have to post out there? What has to be publicly available? Things along those lines, and so I’m going to cover several of these things over the coming months. But I just wanted to give you a really quick list that you can use to make sure that you have covered all of your bases in regards to your website. So here it is for doctors, for chiropractic physicians in Illinois.
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The first is this: you got to make sure that your notice of privacy practices, and this is a HIPAA requirement, that your notice of privacy practices is posted on your website. Make sure it has the February 2026 update language in there as well. Good faith estimates-you’ve got to have your good faith estimate notice also posted on your website. In fact, the law indicates that it has to be in a prominent location, so you can’t just bury these on an unsearchable page. They have to be readily findable and easily found by prospective patients or the public, so both of those are critical. Now, if you accept Medicare, so if you see any Medicare patients at all, you want to make sure that you have your Section 1557 language assistance notice covered. There are some requirements there that a lengthy conversation because a portion of it was stricken down by the courts and a portion of it was not. So you still have to make sure that that post that 1557 language for language assistance is actually on your website and again it has to be readily available.
Now, coming down the pipeline, there are all kinds of accessibility requirements on a website surrounding the ADA and things along those lines. Those deadlines are May of 2027 and May of 2028. We are going to be putting out some additional information, articles, and videos to help you navigate all of those requirements coming up soon. Now, here are some other key indicators that you want to make sure that you watch. If you’re using any kind of Google Analytics or Facebook Pixels or similar type tracking tools, keep these off of your portals and intake forms and things along those lines. That’s when it gets to be a bit a bit challenging and questionable. There’s a lot of conflicting information and some challenges surrounding this, but the easiest thing and in those portal sections, especially because those are existing patients, and that information is shared then a lot of times with Facebook, with Google, and things along those lines. So business associate agreements are required in some of those cases. You just have to be very careful. So just make sure that you’re loading your trackers really only after visitors, and then only after they’ve accepted. Now, I would also strongly encourage you, and there’s to include a cookie notice for the first time that somebody visits your page, where they click yes that they agree to accept the cookies, or some of them allow you to minimize the number of cookie trackings and things along those lines, but work with your IT professional to make sure that you get all of that right as well.
You want to make sure that all of your website. This is strongly encouraged. Make sure your entire thing is actually behind secure HTTPS, which is secured portion of your website. Most websites are going to do that now in 2026, but you definitely want to make sure that you’re locked down on any kind of submission forms that you have there as well. Make sure that your terms and conditions are laid out well and also readily available for your patients, but the biggest ones: your notice of privacy practices, your good faith estimates. You want to make sure that your Section 1557 is also included. All of these have to be findable and clean up your cookies and their locations and what they’re tracking. We’ll walk through a number of these things in the coming months, especially as we come in closer to May of 2027. Hopefully this helps you out this week. We’ll catch you next week.
