This policy explains what happens to information you give us through this website — the contact page, the new client form, and ordinary browsing. We keep what those forms ask for to a minimum on purpose.
It is not our HIPAA Notice of Privacy Practices. That separate notice governs your clinical record once you become a client
Who We Are
The Wellness Loft is a mental health counseling practice located at 408 S. 4th Street, Effingham, Illinois. We are staffed by Illinois state-licensed therapists and provide individual, relationship, family, and child and adolescent therapy.
This policy applies to thewellnessloft.com and any page or form hosted on it. In this policy, “we,” “us,” and “our” mean The Wellness Loft; “you” means anyone who visits the site or submits information through it.
This policy and our HIPAA notice
We are a covered entity under the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA). That means information about your health, your treatment, and payment for your care is protected health information, and it is governed by federal and Illinois law — not by this website policy alone.
This policy covers the narrower question of what happens to information on our website: what our forms collect, what our web host and analytics tools record, and what you can do about it.
Information you give us
You can browse most of this site without telling us anything. You only give us information when you choose to fill in a form, email us, or call the number listed on the site.
Contact Form
Our contact form asks for four things: your name, your phone number, a subject, and your message. That’s all. We don’t ask for an email address, so unless you tell us otherwise, we’ll reply by phone.
concerns you want to work on. None of that belongs in a website form. We collect what we need later.
The message box is free text, so please use your judgment about what goes in it. A sentence or two about what you’re looking for is plenty, and we’d rather you didn’t write more than that. Anything you do write is treated as confidential and handled the same way as the rest of your information — see section 12 for how.
You’re never required to use the form. If you’d rather start with a phone call, we’re at (217) 347-5118.
Contacting us directly
If you email or call us, we keep what you send — your name, contact details, and whatever you chose to tell us — so we can respond and, where relevant, add it to your record.
Information collected automatically
Like most websites, ours records some technical information when you visit. Our web host and the services that keep the site running may log:
- Your IP address and general location derived from it
- Your browser type, operating system, and device type
- The pages you viewed, when, and for how long
- The site or search that sent you here
We use this to keep the site working, diagnose problems, and understand in general terms which pages people find useful. We do not try to identify individual visitors from it, and we do not combine it with your clinical record.
How we use information
We use what you give us through this site to:
- Respond to your question or request
- Match you with a therapist and schedule an appointment
- Verify your insurance benefits and handle billing
- Provide and coordinate your care
- Meet our legal, professional, and licensing obligations
- Maintain and improve the website itself
We do not sell your information. We do not rent or trade it. We do not use protected health information for marketing or advertising, and we do not use it to target ads to you anywhere, including on social media.
How we share information
We share information only where we need to, and only as HIPAA and Illinois law allow:
- With our therapists and staff, so they can provide and coordinate your care.
- With service providers who work on our behalf — our web host, our electronic health record and scheduling system, and our billing service. Each is bound by a business associate agreement that requires them to protect your information and use it only for the work we have asked them to do.
- With your insurance company, if you are using insurance, to verify benefits and submit claims.
- With your written authorization, to anyone you direct — for example, another provider or a family member.
- Where the law requires or permits it, including mandatory reporting of suspected abuse or neglect, responses to valid court orders, and situations involving a serious and imminent threat of harm. Our Notice of Privacy Practices describes these in more detail.
Email, text, and web forms
Please don’t send anything urgent this way
If you are in crisis, do not use this website, email, or text. Call or text 988 for the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline, call 911, or go to your nearest emergency room. We cannot monitor messages around the clock and may not see yours for some time.
Ordinary email and text messages are not fully secure. They pass through systems we do not control and can, in principle, be intercepted or misdirected. We take reasonable steps to protect messages once they reach us, but we cannot guarantee their security in transit.
If you email or text us anyway, we will take that as your agreement to communicate that way, and we will reply in kind unless you ask us not to. You can withdraw that at any time by telling us you’d prefer phone calls or our secure client portal instead.
We ask that you keep detail to a minimum in email and text — enough for us to know who you are and what you need, and no more.
The same applies to the contact form. It travels over the internet and reaches us as an email, so we do not treat it as a secure channel and neither should you. Once your message reaches us it is confidential and protected like anything else we hold about you, but we cannot guarantee its security on the way. That is why the form asks for so little, and why we follow up by phone.
Cookies and analytics
Cookies are small files a website stores in your browser. Ours uses some to keep the site functioning — remembering your preferences, keeping pages loading quickly, and similar housekeeping. Others come from the measurement and advertising tools described below.
Analytics
We use Google Analytics to understand how people find and move through the site — which pages are visited, how long people stay, and what device and general region they’re in. This is reported to us in aggregate. We use it to decide what to write and what to fix, not to identify individual visitors. Google offers a browser add-on at tools.google.com/dlpage/gaoptout that stops Analytics from measuring your visits to any site.
Advertising
We run advertising through META (Facebook & Instagram) and Google and those platforms place tags on parts of our site so we can see whether our ads are reaching people and reasonably reflect what we spend. These tags can associate your visit with an account you hold on those platforms.
You can limit this from your side. Meta’s ad preferences and Google’s ad settings both let you turn off personalized advertising, and most browsers and ad blockers will block these tags outright if you prefer.
Your Browser Settings
Most browsers let you block or delete cookies. Blocking them may affect how parts of the site work. Some browsers also send a Global Privacy Control signal.
Links & Social Media
Our site links to places we don’t control — Google Maps for directions, our Instagram and Facebook pages, and insurance or provider directories. Once you follow one of those links, that company’s privacy policy applies, not ours.
If you message us on social media, be aware that the platform can see what you send. We will move the conversation to phone or email before discussing anything clinical.
Minors
This website is meant for adults. We do not knowingly collect information from children through the site on their own initiative.
We do treat children and adolescents. Where a client is under 18, we expect a parent or guardian to make the first contact, or a minor whom Illinois law permits to seek services on their own. We gather the details about a young client through our secure intake process, not through this website.
Illinois gives minors certain independent rights over their own mental health records, and those rights can limit what we share with a parent. We will talk this through with you and your child at the start of treatment. If you believe a child has given us information through this site that they should not have, contact us and we will delete it.
How long we keep information
If you become a client, your records are kept for as long as Illinois law and our professional obligations require, and then securely destroyed.
If you submit an intake form or a question and do not become a client, we keep what you sent only as long as we need it to respond and to show we handled your request properly, then delete it.
Technical logs are kept for a short period and then discarded or aggregated.
Security
We use administrative, physical, and technical safeguards to protect the information we hold: encrypted connections to this website, access limited to staff who need it, business associate agreements with the vendors who handle health information on our behalf, and staff training on privacy obligations.
Submissions from our website form are delivered to a practice email account.
No website or system is perfectly secure, and we cannot promise that information sent over the internet can never be intercepted. If a breach affecting your protected health information does occur, we will notify you as HIPAA requires.
Your choices and rights
Over your health records, HIPAA and Illinois law give you rights to inspect and get a copy of your record, ask for corrections, ask for restrictions on how we use or share it, ask us to contact you a particular way, and get a list of certain disclosures we have made. Our Notice of Privacy Practices explains each of these and how to exercise them.
Over website information, you can contact us at any time to ask what we hold, ask us to correct it, or ask us to delete something you submitted through a form. You can also control cookies through your browser and decline to fill in any form.
If you believe your privacy rights have been violated, you may contact us using the details below, or 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.
Illinois mental health records
Illinois protects mental health records more strictly than federal law does. Under the Illinois Mental Health and Developmental Disabilities Confidentiality Act, most disclosures of your mental health records require your written consent, even in situations where HIPAA alone might permit disclosure without it.
Where Illinois law is stricter than HIPAA, we follow Illinois law.
Changes to this policy
We may update this policy as our practice, our website, or the law changes. When we do, we will change the date at the top of the page. Substantial changes will be noted on the site. Continuing to use the website after a change means the updated policy applies to you.
Contact Us
If you have a question about this policy, want to exercise a right described in it, or want to raise a privacy concern, reach out to us.
Phone: 217-347-5118
Email: info@thewellnessloft.com
Mail: The Wellness Loft, 408 S. 4th Street, Effingham, IL 62401
Please don’t include clinical detail in an email to that address. Tell us you’d like to talk and we’ll call you back.