When we text or email you

The practice may use electronic messaging for a wide range of matters related to your care and to running things here, including:

• Appointment reminders and confirmations, schedule changes, and anything you need to do before a visit.
• Follow-ups after a visit, checking how you are getting on, and coordinating your care with other clinicians involved in it.
• Information about the services we offer, and how and when to reach us.
• Insurance, eligibility and benefits, billing questions, and account balances.
• Invitations to give feedback about a visit, including how to leave a review.

Some of these are sent by an automated system rather than typed by a person at the moment they go out — an appointment reminder is a scheduled message, not somebody remembering. Any message between you and the practice may become part of your medical record.

Every text and call you make to us goes to one number, (616) 747-8462, and it is the number to use for anything urgent.

Text and ordinary email are convenient because they are open, and they are risky for the same reason. Before you consent, these are the risks worth understanding:

• A message can be forwarded, copied, printed and stored — on a screen or on paper — long after you have stopped thinking about it.
• A message is easy to misaddress. One wrong digit or one wrong autocomplete sends it to somebody who was never meant to read it.
• Deleting a message does not necessarily destroy it. Backup copies can survive on either end, and with the carriers in between.
• Text and unencrypted email are not secure in transit. A message can in principle be intercepted, altered or used without authorisation, and without either of us noticing.
• A phone or an inbox that other people can open is a phone or an inbox where other people can read what we sent you.
• Where a device or an email account is provided by an employer, the employer generally has the right to inspect what passes through it.
• Your phone carrier or email provider may charge you for messages, calls or data.
• Messages can be produced as evidence in a legal proceeding.

The practice will take reasonable care with the security and confidentiality of what it sends, and cannot guarantee either on an open channel. Consenting to electronic messaging means accepting the following conditions.

• Anything urgent goes by phone. A text sits unread until somebody opens it, and we are closed for parts of every week — the hours are at the foot of every page. Neither the texting line nor the inbox is monitored for urgent needs.
• Non-urgent things are what it is for. Booking, rescheduling, insurance questions, directions, letting us know you are running late. Call, text, or use the contact form.
• Electronic messages between you and the practice may be filed into your medical record.
• The practice is not responsible for a breach of confidentiality caused by you or by a third party — a shared phone, a forwarded message, an employer-owned account, a carrier.
• You are responsible for any charge your carrier or provider makes for a call, a message, or the data it uses, whether that is billed per minute, per message, per unit of data or otherwise.
• Consent to messaging is never a condition of treatment. Say no, or say stop later, and you are treated exactly the same.

Unless you withdraw it sooner, this consent lasts as long as you are a patient of the practice and ends when that relationship does.

You can stop at any time, by any of these routes:

• Reply STOP to any text from us, and we stop texting you.
• Tell us in writing — text us, or send us a message, or write to 3888 Lake Michigan Dr NW, Grand Rapids, MI 49534.
• Say so at the front desk, or on the phone.

Withdrawing costs you nothing. It does not affect your treatment, your benefits, your eligibility for anything, or any right you would otherwise have — we simply reach you by phone or by post instead. Allow a business day or two for it to take effect, and tell us again if something slips through.

One thing withdrawal cannot do is reach backwards. Messages already sent, and anything already filed into your record, stay where they are.

By opting in to messaging from Westside Chiropractic, you agree to receive text messages about appointment reminders, schedule changes, follow-ups after a visit, check-ins and general office communication. Message and data rates may apply. Message frequency varies. For help, call or text (616) 747-8462 or send us a message. Reply STOP to opt out at any time. What this website does with information you send it is set out in our privacy policy.