Is my ADHD telehealth appointment private and secure?

Yes: the same privacy laws cover a video appointment as an in-person one

A telehealth ADHD appointment is a health-care visit in the eyes of the law. In Ontario, the Personal Health Information Protection Act, 2004 (PHIPA) makes the clinician who assesses you a health information custodian whether you meet in a clinic or over video, and the Information and Privacy Commissioner of Ontario has confirmed that PHIPA applies to virtual care in the same way as in-person care. Alberta's Health Information Act places the same custodian duties on physicians and registered nurses practising in that province. Where a province has no health-specific statute covering private clinics, the federal Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (PIPEDA) applies to commercial health organizations, with the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada handling complaints.

Those laws set the ground rules: collect only what is needed for your care, keep it secure, use it only for the purpose you were told about, and disclose it to nobody outside your care without your consent, apart from narrow legal exceptions such as a court order or an immediate safety risk. The licensed nurse practitioners and clinicians working with Finding Focus are bound by these rules and by the standards of their own regulatory colleges.

Regulators require encrypted platforms, identity checks and consent for anything less secure

Physician and nursing regulators have turned the statutes into practical rules. The College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario's Virtual Care policy requires physicians to use secure technology such as encrypted platforms, to conduct the encounter in a private setting, and to obtain your express consent if a less secure channel, an ordinary phone line for example, has to be used. It also requires reasonable steps to confirm your identity, usually your name and date of birth, and a check that the place you are calling from is appropriate and safe. The College of Nurses of Ontario states that virtual technology does not change a nurse's accountability and that care is considered to take place where the patient is physically located.

• A video link unique to your appointment, not a public meeting room.
• A consent conversation at the start that covers the limits of virtual care, including privacy.
• No recording of the session unless you agree in advance.
• A written record stored in a clinical system, not in a chat app or a personal email account.
• A plan for what happens if the technology fails, usually a phone call to the number on your file.

The Information and Privacy Commissioner of Ontario's guidance on virtual visits adds the clinic-side expectations: choose a platform with appropriate safeguards, limit what is collected, tell patients how the platform handles their information, and document the visit the same way as any other.

Who can see your assessment record, and who cannot

Everything beyond your care team flows through you. The table shows the usual pattern under Canadian health privacy law.

In Ontario, PHIPA also lets you give an express instruction that particular information not be shared with other providers, sometimes called a lockbox. The clinician must still keep an accurate record of anything relevant to safe care, so use the instruction for what goes out, not for what goes in.

You have a right to see, copy and correct what was written about you

You are entitled to your own record. PHIPA section 52 gives Ontario patients a right of access to their records of personal health information. Alberta's Health Information Act requires a custodian to respond to an access request within 30 days and allows a fee of up to $25, which can be waived. Where PIPEDA applies, its individual-access principle gives you the same right against a private clinic. You can also ask for a correction when something factual is wrong; the custodian must either fix it or attach your statement of disagreement to the file.

If you believe your information was mishandled, complaints go to the provincial privacy commissioner (Ontario, Alberta and British Columbia each have one) or to the federal Office of the Privacy Commissioner where PIPEDA applies. Finding Focus provides copies of your own documents on request: the standard diagnosis letter is $49 and the healthcare-provider report is $99, and you can read what each one contains before you order.

The weak link is usually your end of the call: six ways to close it

• Use a personal device on a home or mobile network. An employer-managed laptop may be monitored, and a work network may log traffic.
• Sit in a room with a door and wear headphones, so only your side of the conversation can be overheard.
• Close screen-sharing, recording and remote-support apps before you join.
• Join from the link the clinic sent, not a forwarded copy, and update your browser or the clinic's app beforehand.
• Do not record the session on a shared household device unless you can store the file securely.
• Block out the full time. The Finding Focus adult assessment runs up to 75 minutes, and interruptions tend to come from other people, not from the platform.

If you cannot find a private space at home, ask the clinic whether a different time or a phone appointment is possible. What matters is that you can speak frankly about your history, because a DSM-5-TR based assessment is built on that history. The free self-assessment screener is a low-stakes first step; it is a screener, not a diagnosis, and only a licensed clinician's assessment can tell you whether you have ADHD.