Privacy Notice for pharmacovigilance and medical information enquiries

 

Last updated: [2020.11.01]

 

General Information

Astellas Pharma Korea, Inc. ("Astellas") respects your right to privacy and treats your personal information in accordance with applicable laws and regulations. This Privacy Notice explains who we are, how we collect and process personal information about you for pharmacovigilance and medical information purposes, and how you can exercise your privacy rights. If you have any questions or concerns about our use of your personal information, then please contact us using the contact details provided at the bottom of this Privacy Notice.

Astellas or a third party authorized by Astellas is processing your personal data in accordance with the applicable data protection laws including, but not limited to Personal Information Protection Act in Korea (the ”PIPA”) and we may obtain a separate consent in each case based on requirement of PIPA.

What does Astellas do?

Astellas Pharma is a global pharmaceutical business, whose ultimate parent company is headquartered in Tokyo, Japan.  Our mission is to improve the lives of patients in the following key areas: transplantation, urology, oncology and anti-infectives.

For more information about Astellas, please see the "About" section of our Website at https://www.astellas.eu/about/about/.

 

What personal information does Astellas collect and for what purposes?

The types of information we may collect and process, and the reasons why we ask you to provide it, will depend on the category of data subjects and/or the data processing activity:

 

Pharmacovigilance purposes:

We may collect the following personal information depending on the individual contacting us (patient or reporter of an adverse event): name, surname, age, date/year of birth, gender, initials, contact details and profession. We may collect additional personal data in relation to health data or medical history of an individual experiencing an adverse event. We may be required by law to use your information to assess the safety of our products and report the data to the regulatory authorities. For reporting data to the regulatory authorities your personal information will be shared in an anonymous manner. Your data will not be used for other purposes other than activities related to pharmacovigilance.

We may receive personal information about you from third party sources (such as the physician who treats you), but only where we have checked that these third parties either have your consent or are otherwise legally permitted or required to disclose your personal information to us. The types of information we may collect from third parties will include the above types of personal information and we use the information we receive from these third parties only to assess the safety of our products, report any adverse events to regulatory authorities and contact you for any follow up information or for confirmation purposes.

 

Medical Information enquiries purposes:

We may collect name, surname, initials, date/year of birth, gender, contact details and profession of the individual contacting us with a medical enquiry. We may collect health data or data relating to the medical history of an individual submitting an enquiry to us. We collect this information to respond to your enquiry and follow up with you if necessary in order to comply with our legal obligations.  We may be required by law to report your data to the regulatory authorities, to the extent your enquiry is associated with an adverse event.

If we ask you to provide any other personal information not described above, then the personal information we will ask you to provide, and the reasons why we ask you to provide it, will be made clear to you at the point we collect your personal information.

In general, we will use the personal information we collect from you only for the purposes described in this Privacy Notice or for purposes that we explain to you at the time we collect your personal information.  However, we may also use your personal information for other purposes that are not incompatible with the purposes we have disclosed to you (such as archiving purposes in the public interest, scientific or historical research purposes, or statistical purposes) if and where this is permitted by applicable data protection laws.

 

Who does Astellas share my personal information with?

We may disclose your personal information to the following categories of recipients:

  • to our group companies and affiliates, third party services providers and partners, who provide data processing services to us, or who otherwise process personal information for purposes that are described in this Privacy Notice, such as operating the relevant pharmacovigilance and medical information services & databases and assisting Astellas to fulfil reporting obligations. A list of our current group companies is available here ;

  • to any competent law enforcement body, regulatory, government agency, court or other third party where we believe disclosure is necessary (i) as a matter of applicable law or regulation, (ii) to exercise, establish or defend our legal rights, or (iii) to protect your vital interests or those of any other person;

  • to a potential buyer (and its agents and advisers) in connection with any proposed purchase, merger or acquisition of any part of our business, provided that we inform the buyer it must use your personal information only for the purposes disclosed in this Privacy Notice.

 

How does Astellas keep my personal information secure?

We use appropriate technical and organisational measures to protect the personal information that we collect and process about you.  The measures we use are designed to provide a level of security appropriate to the risk of processing your personal information. 

 

International data transfers

Your personal information may be transferred to, and processed in countries other than the country in which you are resident. These countries may have data protection laws that are different to the laws of your country and may not provide the same level of protection as your country.

However, we have taken appropriate safeguards to require that your personal information will remain protected in accordance with this Privacy Notice. These include implementing the Standard Contractual Clauses for transfers of personal information between our group companies.

We have implemented similar appropriate safeguards with our third party service providers and partners and further details can be provided upon request.

 

Data retention

Unless there is an obligation for Astellas to preserve your personal information in accordance with the provision of the relevant laws, we retain personal information we collect for pharmacovigilance and enquiries purposes until the purpose of collection and use has been achieved. Once the purpose of its use is complete or consent is withdrawn, the information will be destroyed immediately in a safe manner.

 

Your data protection rights

We respond to all requests we receive from individuals wishing to exercise their data protection rights in accordance with the applicable data protection laws. Indicatively:

If you wish to access, correct, update or request deletion of your personal information or object to or restrict the processing of your personal information, you may be entitled to do so, according to local laws, by contacting us using the process and the contact details provided under the “How to contact us” heading below. Similarly, if we have collected and processed your personal information with your consent, then you may be entitled to withdraw your consent. Withdrawing your consent will not affect the lawfulness of any processing we conducted prior to your withdrawal, nor will it affect processing of your personal information conducted in reliance on lawful processing grounds other than consent. Again, you can do so at any time by contacting us using the process and the contact details provided under the “How to contact us” heading below. Please note that those rights may be limited due to our legal obligations on pharmacovigilance legislation. 

You may have the right to complain to a data protection authority about our collection and use of your personal information.  For more information, please contact your local data protection authority.

Updates to this Privacy Notice

We may update this Privacy Notice from time to time in response to changing legal, technical or business developments. When we update our Privacy Notice, we will take appropriate measures to inform you, consistent with the significance of the changes we make.  We will obtain your consent to any material Privacy Notice changes if and where this is required by applicable data protection laws.

You can see when this Privacy Notice was last updated by checking the “last updated” date displayed at the top of this Privacy Notice. 

 

How to contact us

If you have any questions or concerns about our use of your personal information, please contact our data protection officer using the following details: [email protected]