A clinic, a med spa or anyone keeping treatment notes and intake forms handles protected health information. With Health information switched on under Admin, Compliance, BookNovi holds those records the way HIPAA asks: sealed in the database, read only by the logins that need them, every read written down, and never sent to a service that has not signed for them. This article says what counts, who reads it and what never leaves. Compliance has the switch itself and the rest of the controls.
What counts as health information
Every column of a record that can carry health detail has a class, kept in one place in the app, so nothing new slips through unclassed:
- Read only with Read health records, and sealed: a client's notes, formulas and treatment notes; what a client answered on an intake, a consent, a waiver or a SOAP note, and what was drawn on it; your own fields marked as health information; voice notes on a client, a visit or a form; and the notes, transcript, summary and plan of a meeting marked as health information.
- Read with the record, and masked wherever words leave the app: what is always worth knowing about a client (allergies, sensitivities), the notes on a visit, a note on a measurement or a photo, and a goal. The calendar and the front desk work from these, so whoever opens the record reads them, as before; webhooks, the email services and a model without an agreement do not.
- Personal: who a person is and how to reach them, and what they wrote or said to you, which goes to a model only under its agreement (below).
- Ordinary: everything else.
A field of your own is drafted as Ordinary, Personal or Health information under Settings, Records (Fields and objects). A health field keeps words or a value (a link to a record or to someone on the team stays readable, so keep the health detail in a field of its own), never shows on the website, and a change to who reads a field is reviewed before it is published.
A meeting about a client (a client on it, or among its people) and every call is marked as health information as it is captured. Mark as health information on the meeting's page marks one by hand; taking the mark off takes Read health records, since it lets everyone who sees the meeting read its words.
Who reads it
An owner always reads health records, and so does every login given Read health records under Settings, Team: it starts on for admins and for the team who serve clients, and off for managers and the front desk. A login without it sees that a note, a filled form, a health field, a voice note or a meeting is there, who wrote it and when, and never its words: they show as Health information, with why. It cannot change or remove those words, download a filled form's PDF, send a copy, or open a meeting's words, and Download everything gives it the rest of the business with the health records' words left out (a kept copy, which holds them whole, is not downloaded at all).
The same holds however the records are reached. A key reads as the person who made it. A person talking to the assistant in BookNovi reads through it as themselves. Claude, ChatGPT or another assistant connected from outside never reads a health record's words at a business keeping health information.
While the switch is off, everyone who may open a client's record reads it, as before.
Every read is written down
Each time a health record's words are read, on a screen, through the API, by the assistant, at a calendar link or by a client at their own copy's link, the access log keeps who read it, which record, why (the screen or the call that read it) and the request it was read in. The access review under Admin, Compliance counts each login's looks; the rows cannot be changed or removed by anyone. A read that cannot be written down is not given: the screen asks you to try again in a moment.
What never leaves without an agreement
At a business keeping health information, a dictation or a meeting's recording is never sent to the transcriber, a health record or a client's message is never sent to a model, and ChatGPT's voice does not start, unless that service is under a business associate agreement for the business:
- BookNovi signs the agreements with the services the platform runs on, and its platform team marks each one as it is signed. None is assumed: until the model's or the transcriber's is marked, nothing goes to either.
- Under Admin, Compliance, Vendors, each service is listed with what it sees and where its agreement stands, and an owner chooses whether the model and the transcriber are sent this business's health information. A business can turn either off for itself, never on beyond what BookNovi signed.
- Without the model's agreement, the assistant reads no health record and no client's message (and says so), a voice note is tidied by the app itself, and a meeting's summary is kept from its notes as typed. An automation's Ask the assistant card about a client is not asked, and says why.
- Without it, the receptionist reads nothing: a text, an email or a chat waits in the inbox for the team with a to-do, and the client is told once that the team has it; a caller is asked to leave their name and what they are calling about, and the message waits the same way, to call them back. The inbox drafts no reply. The receptionist's screen and the inbox each say so.
- Without the transcriber's, a recording is kept as it is, and the device's own speech recognition still hears a voice note. Without OpenAI's, ChatGPT's voice does not start, since what is said to it goes to OpenAI; the assistant's own Conversation still works.
Each refusal says why and where to change it. The device's own speech recognition is the phone's or the browser's, under its maker's terms, not BookNovi's; type the note when that matters.
Best practices
- Switch health information on before the first treatment note is written, so every note is sealed as it is written.
- Give Read health records to the people who treat clients, and leave the front desk without it: they still see that a form is on file.
- Mark your own fields that hold health detail as health information when you draft them.
- Read Vendors after the switch goes on: until the agreements are marked, the assistant, the receptionist, the drafted replies and the transcriber hold back.