Consent, privacy and record safety: how PhysioDesk protects your patients' records

Patients tell physiotherapists things they tell few others, and the record of their treatment matters long after they are discharged. Clinic software has to be built so that records are kept, kept private, and kept honest. These are the rules PhysioDesk follows.

Consent to treatment

Each patient consents to treatment against a written wording with a version number, so you always know exactly what they agreed to.

• The patient can sign it themselves in the patient portal.

• Or your staff can record consent given on paper or in the room, noting who signed: the patient, a parent, a guardian, a spouse or a carer.

The consent shows on the patient's record.

Each clinic sees only its own

Every request is checked against the clinic of the person signed in, on the server, never on what a browser sends. One clinic's records cannot be reached from another's account. Within a clinic, each person sees what their role allows: a therapist sees the patients they treat, and money figures are for the owner and clinic admins only.

A log that cannot be altered

Every time a patient's record is opened, changed or exported, it is written to a log. Each entry is chained to the one before it, so an entry cannot be changed or removed without the chain showing the break, and PhysioDesk checks the chain every night.

Change history you can read

Separately from that log, each record has a change history you can open yourself: who changed which detail, from what to what, and when. It covers patients, sessions, diagnoses and bills.

Nothing is ever erased by accident

PhysioDesk does not delete patient records. Removing a patient hides them from the clinic's lists and keeps the record, because medical records have to be kept. Completed sessions cannot be deleted; bills, once sent, cannot be edited. If a patient deletes their own login, their record stays with the clinic, marked so you know.

Privacy requests

A patient can ask, from the patient portal, for a copy of their record, a correction, erasure, someone to act for them, or to raise a complaint. The request comes to your clinic under Patients, in Privacy requests, and you answer within 30 days. The answer appears to the patient on the same page. Choosing a copy lets them download their record straight away.

Your data is yours

The owner can download everything the clinic keeps in PhysioDesk at any time, from Settings, under Data. Any single patient's full record can be exported from their page.

Signing in

Staff and patients sign in with their own mobile number: a WhatsApp code the first time, then a password they choose. Everyone signs in again once a week, and at once if they change their password or their access is turned off. Repeated wrong passwords lock an account for a while.

Emergency access, and you are told

If PhysioDesk ever has to read a clinic's records, for example to investigate a fault the clinic reported, the person must give a written reason, the access is read-only, it ends on its own, and it is logged. The clinic's dashboard shows every such access with its reason, so nothing happens without the clinic knowing.

Read more

Our security page and privacy policy set out the details in full.