Security & Trust at Write My Consult

The short version

Here's what matters most, up front:

• Your consult audio is never stored. It's transcribed and immediately discarded.
• Your clinic only ever sees its own records. Strict per-clinic isolation, enforced fail-closed.
• Everything travels over encrypted (HTTPS/TLS) connections.
• Passwords are hashed with Argon2id — we never store or see your actual password.
• You control how long notes are kept, and they're automatically deleted after that.
• We use a small number of trusted US service providers for transcription, note generation, and email, under data-processing agreements.
• Every note is AI-drafted and must be reviewed and signed by you — the vet stays in charge of the record.
• We're honest about what we haven't done yet: our servers are currently hosted offshore (migration to Sydney is underway), and notes are not yet encrypted at the application layer inside our database.

Encryption in transit

All communication between your browser, our app, and the services we rely on is encrypted using TLS (the same HTTPS technology your bank uses). This protects your data as it moves across the internet — login details, audio, transcripts, and notes are never sent in the clear. We enforce HTTPS across the application.

Your audio is never stored

This is a deliberate design choice. When you record a consultation, the audio is streamed straight to our transcription provider, converted to text, and then dropped. It is held only in memory long enough to transcribe — it is never written to disk or saved on our servers, and there is no audio file to recover, leak, or subpoena later. What we keep is the text transcript and the clinical note generated from it.

Strict per-clinic data isolation

Write My Consult is sold per clinic, and every clinic's data is walled off from every other clinic's. Our access checks are 'fail-closed': if the system can't positively confirm that a record belongs to your clinic, it denies access rather than guessing. A clinic can only ever see, search, or export its own records — never another practice's.

Passwords and account security

We never store your password. We store only an Argon2id hash of it — Argon2id is a modern, deliberately slow password-hashing algorithm designed to resist brute-force and GPU cracking attacks. Even we cannot read your password, and a stolen database would not reveal it. Account actions like password resets are handled over secure, time-limited links.

Access controls, rate-limiting and security headers

Several layers protect the app from abuse and common web attacks:

• Access controls gate every request so users only reach what they're authorised to see.
• Rate-limiting blunts brute-force login attempts and automated abuse.
• Modern security headers (including HSTS, a Content-Security-Policy, and related protections) are applied to defend against common browser-based attacks such as protocol downgrades and cross-site scripting.

Audit trail on records

We keep an audit log on records so there's an accountable history of activity — what was created and changed, and when. This supports good record-keeping practice and helps with troubleshooting and accountability if a question ever arises about a record.

Configurable retention and automatic deletion

Your clinic chooses how long notes and transcripts are retained. Once a record passes your chosen retention window, it is automatically and permanently purged — you don't have to remember to clean up. (Audio, as noted above, is never retained in the first place.) This lets you align Write My Consult with your own data-minimisation and record-keeping policies.

The service providers we use (sub-processors)

To deliver the product, we rely on a small number of specialist providers, all located in the United States. We use them under data-processing agreements that are being put in place to require zero retention of your data and no use of it to train their models:

• AssemblyAI (US) — transcribes the consult audio to text. Audio passes through for transcription and is not retained by us.
• Anthropic / Claude (US) — generates the draft clinical note and performs a separate safety and accuracy review of it.
• Resend (US) — sends transactional emails only, such as password-reset messages. Not used for marketing.
• Because these providers are in the US, some of your data is processed across borders. The data-processing agreements covering zero retention and no model-training are under agreement and being finalised — we will keep this page accurate as that completes.

Where your data is hosted (and an honest note on this)

We want to be straight with you about hosting, because it matters for Australian clinics. Today, our application and database are hosted on a hardened private server located offshore (in Malaysia). A migration to a Sydney, Australia region is in progress and is a priority for us — but it is not yet complete, and we won't claim otherwise. When the migration is done, we'll update this page to say so clearly. In the meantime, all the other protections described here (encryption in transit, isolation, retention, access controls) apply regardless of where the server sits.

How data is stored, and what's not yet encrypted at rest

Being honest here too: today, clinical notes and transcripts are stored as plain text inside our database, which runs on a hardened host where the database is reachable only from the server itself (it is not exposed to the public internet). We have not yet added application-layer encryption of notes at rest — so we don't claim it. Adding at-rest encryption is on our roadmap. Our backups, however, are encrypted (see below), and audio is never stored at all.

Backups

We take backups so your records aren't lost to a hardware failure or accident, and those backups are encrypted. Backups are subject to the same care and access controls as the live system.

The vet stays in charge (automated-decision-making)

Write My Consult drafts notes using AI — it does not make clinical decisions for you. Every note is a draft that must be reviewed, corrected as needed, and signed off by the treating vet. Your clinic remains clinically and legally responsible for the final record. We mention this plainly because the note is generated by an automated system, and you should always treat its output as a starting point, not a finished record.

Privacy, jurisdiction and consent

Write My Consult operates under Australian law (governing law: Victoria), and the Privacy Act and Australian Privacy Principles apply. In privacy terms, your clinic is the treating provider and Write My Consult processes consult data on your clinic's behalf. Recording-consent laws differ by state (for example, one-party-consent states such as VIC, QLD and NT versus all-party-consent states such as NSW, WA, SA, TAS and ACT). Obtaining the pet owner's consent to record each consultation is the clinic's responsibility, and our workflow is built to support you doing that.

What we do NOT claim

We'd rather be trusted than impressive. So, to be explicit: Write My Consult does not currently hold ISO 27001, SOC 2, or HIPAA certification or attestation, and we make no such claims. (HIPAA is a US healthcare framework that doesn't apply to Australian veterinary records in any case.) We describe only the concrete security measures we actually have in place. If and when we pursue formal certifications, we'll say so here — and not before.

Questions or security concerns

If you have a question about how we handle your data, want to report a security concern, or need help with retention settings or data export, email us at support@writemyconsult.com. We take responsible disclosure seriously and will respond promptly.