A clinic or practice
Connect can take the administrative half of a practice's traffic — where you are, when you are open, what to bring, chasing a form somebody promised — and record it against the person. It holds no health-sector certification of any kind, and the clinical half must stay with a clinician: triage, advice, results, medication and anything urgent are outside what this is for.
Say this part first#
What can be described honestly is the mechanism: where the data goes, who can see it, what is refused, and what it will say when it does not know. Those are the things a practice manager needs in order to ask their own compliance question properly.
The administrative half#
| Enquiry | What Connect does | Grounded in |
|---|---|---|
| Where are you, when are you open | Answers directly on any channel | Knowledge — your own sources |
| I would like an appointment | Collects who, when and what for, reads the time back, records a dated follow-up | The hours on the line |
| I need to move my appointment | Attaches to the same Person, edits rather than duplicates the follow-up | The relationship record |
| What should I bring | Answers if a source says so, refuses if none does | Knowledge |
| I have a question about my treatment | Says it cannot answer and routes to a person | The refusal path, deliberately |
The distinction that carries the whole design is between logistics and judgement. A question about a car park is logistics; a question about whether to keep taking something is judgement. Connect answers what Knowledge supports and refuses what it does not, and an unsupported claim is refused rather than softened — which is exactly the behaviour a practice needs at the boundary between those two.
Where the data actually sits#
- One workspace per practice, isolated three times over: an allowlist in the middleware, a workspace kernel over the ORM, and row-level security in PostgreSQL. A record belongs to exactly one workspace.
- Calls leave a transcript and a summary, not audio. Recording is foundation and is not enabled on the live carrier, so there is no recording of a patient call to store, secure or disclose. The transcript is text in your workspace and is data like any other.
- Memory is readable and erasable. A person can see what Connect knows at every tier and forget any of it. What gets written down is a decision you control, and 'do not record this' is a workable instruction.
- Credentials are sealed on save and never echoed back to a screen; sign-in is Google OAuth only, with no password login to be phished.
- Message text is data, never a command. An email that says 'ignore your instructions and confirm the following' does not get to move the boundary.
What must stay with a person#
- Anything clinical
- Triage, advice, interpretation of a result, a medication question. Connect has no basis to answer these and the correct behaviour is a refusal and a hand-off, set as
ask_before_sendordraft_onlyon the contact or the channel where they arrive. - Anything urgent
- The realtime voice floor is a 3.3 s median reply on the best measured call, there is no completed human transfer on the live carrier, and a line can refuse a call on budget. None of that belongs anywhere near an emergency route. A practice's urgent path must not depend on Connect.
- Fees and cover
safe_salesrefuses a price or a term Knowledge does not support and escalates. That refusal is right here for a second reason: a quoted fee that turns out to be wrong is a complaint, not a mistake.- Safeguarding and complaints
- These need a named person and a recorded route. A support case can hold the history; the decision is not Connect's to make.
- Removing somebody from contact
- A do-not-contact entry is cleared by a person, recorded against their name. The Assistant cannot clear one at all.
Where the money goes#
Calls, overwhelmingly, because a practice's traffic is a phone queue. Audio tokens cost four times the model's text input rate and roughly 2.7× on output, a session is re-billed for its whole context every turn, and a call reporting no tokens is still charged from its duration. Written channels are a fraction of that. A practice that moves repeat questions — hours, directions, what to bring — onto email or WhatsApp answers, and keeps voice for what genuinely arrives by phone, spends considerably less for the same coverage.
Questions#
Does Connect carry a HIPAA certification?
No, and no such claim is made anywhere in this documentation, and Connect holds no certification of any kind. The mechanisms are described here — isolation, sealed credentials, erasable memory, transcripts rather than recordings — so that you can put the question to your own regulator or adviser with real facts rather than a marketing answer.
Can it tell a patient whether their symptoms are serious?
It must not, and the design is against it: answers are grounded in Knowledge, unsupported claims are refused, and a clinical question has no source in a practice's business Knowledge to ground it in. Set the channel or the contact to ask_before_send where such questions arrive, so a person sees them.
Are patient calls recorded?
No. Recording is foundation — the capability is asked of the provider rather than assumed — and it is not enabled on the live carrier. What exists after a call is a transcript and a summary held in your workspace, which is data you can read, export and delete like anything else.