# 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.

- **Status:** Available
- **Audience:** both
- **Channels:** phone, email, whatsapp
- **In the app:** #/calls, #/knowledge, #/autonomy
- **Last verified:** 2026-09-10
- **Canonical:** https://connectbyjbrh.com/docs/use-cases/clinic-or-practice/

## Say this part first

> **Careful** Connect holds no certification — not HIPAA, not ISO, not any other. Nothing on this page should be read as a compliance statement. Whether using it for patient-adjacent communication is lawful where you practise is a question for your own regulator and your own advice, and the answer depends on facts about your practice that no product page can know.

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_send` or `draft_only` on 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_sales` refuses 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.

## Related

- [Communication you must be able to explain](https://connectbyjbrh.com/docs/use-cases/regulated-communication/)
- [Claims Knowledge does not support](https://connectbyjbrh.com/docs/knowledge/unsupported-claims/)
- [Workspace isolation](https://connectbyjbrh.com/docs/security/workspace-isolation/)
- [What is kept and for how long](https://connectbyjbrh.com/docs/security/data-retention/)
- [Booking appointments](https://connectbyjbrh.com/docs/use-cases/appointment-booking/)
- [Forgetting something](https://connectbyjbrh.com/docs/memory/deleting/)

## What this page is based on

- Connect capability registry (docs-source/facts.py) — FORBIDDEN_CLAIMS
- docs-source/sources/GENERAL.md §2 and §10 — isolation and security
- docs-source/sources/PHONE.md §12 — recording, transfer and the latency floor
- docs-source/sources/CHANNELS.md §6 — safe_sales