Patient Data & Privacy Notice

What this notice is

This notice explains, in plain language, what personal information The Heather Cutler Foundation's patient-facing services collect, why, and what they deliberately never collect. It sits alongside the foundation's Privacy Policy, which governs the foundation's handling of personal information generally and is not replaced by this notice. The foundation's handling of personal information is governed by applicable Canadian law, including PIPEDA and, in Newfoundland and Labrador, the Personal Health Information Act (PHIA).

Port to Care applications

Port to Care is the foundation's travel-grant program and its only live patient program. You can apply by email, or through the application service at heathercutler.ca/mcp/port-to-care, which a personal AI assistant can operate with you.

What is collected — the minimum needed to process an application:

• Contact details for the applicant (and the patient's name, where the applicant is applying for someone else).
• Community and province.
• Travel purpose and approximate travel dates.
• The amount requested (grants are up to $500 CAD).
• Your recorded consent, and your recorded confirmation of a plain-language summary of exactly what is being submitted — the service cannot submit without both.

What is never collected:

• Diagnosis details. The application asks only for your attestation that there is a confirmed pancreatic cancer diagnosis; it does not ask for, and its fields cannot hold, diagnosis details.
• Health card numbers.
• Income information. There is no income test.
• Medical records. The care-team confirmation of diagnosis, when the foundation requests it, travels by the existing email route — it is not uploaded to the application service.

What happens after you apply:

• Confirmation emails contain no medical detail.
• A person at the foundation reviews every application, and a person makes every grant decision. No system decides.
• You can withdraw consent, and withdraw the application, at any time by emailing support@heathercutler.ca. Withdrawing consent may end the application.

Our other services collect no patient information

• The clinical trials search service has no field that accepts personal health information. Search filters are things like province, cancer type, and study terms — there is nowhere to enter anything about your health, so none is collected or stored.
• The trial-matching approach in design keeps your profile with your own assistant: our server would receive anonymous filter parameters only, never your details.
• Our website guides and published pages do not require you to provide personal information to read them.

How the information is held

• Foundation email runs on Proton, a Switzerland-based provider, under an executed Business Associate Agreement with Proton AG. That agreement is a contractual safeguard between the foundation and its mail provider; the law that governs the foundation's handling of your information is Canadian — PIPEDA and applicable provincial law, including PHIA in Newfoundland and Labrador.
• Application information is held in a store separate from the foundation's public data, and access is restricted to the Executive Director and the staff accounts he designates, for the purpose of processing the application.
• Personal information is kept only as long as the purpose it was collected for, and the foundation's charitable and legal record-keeping obligations, require; it is then destroyed, except anonymized counts. Specific retention periods are set in each service's governance document; where a schedule has not been confirmed, this notice states the principle rather than a number we have not adopted.

Your choices and questions

Questions about your information, requests to see or correct it, and privacy concerns go to info@heathercutler.ca or 1-855-754-5045, and are read by a person. Questions about a Port to Care application go to support@heathercutler.ca.