Acceptable Use

1. Purpose and scope

This Acceptable Use Policy ("AUP") sets out what you may and may not do with DebriefMD. It forms part of the Terms of Service, and breaching it is a breach of those Terms.

It applies to everyone who uses DebriefMD, on every device, at every time, including a visitor using the public demo at /demo, which needs no account.

The rules below exist for one reason. DebriefMD records real conversations between real people in a clinical environment. Two other parties are always implicated in what you record: the preceptor whose voice is captured, and any patient whose care is discussed. Neither of them signed up for DebriefMD. This policy protects them.

2. What DebriefMD is for

You may use DebriefMD to:

• Record verbal feedback that a supervising clinician gives you about your own performance, with that clinician's agreement, obtained beforehand.
• Review, correct, and edit the transcript and the draft coaching notes DebriefMD produces from that recording.
• Download personal copies of your reviewed notes, explicitly share them with your authorized program and home-site leadership using "Share with program", and send disclosed copies to the recipients the review screen shows you before you send. Personal download is separate from program release: a download or an email copy gives your program no access in DebriefMD (Privacy Policy section 11).
• Track your own progress over time.
• If you are authorized faculty: prepare and sign rotation reports for your program's residents, and record a rotation's closing conversation with a resident who has agreed to it.
• Try the public demo with made-up content, or test DebriefMD with our written authorization (section 9).

That is the whole permitted scope. If what you are about to do is not on that list, assume it is not permitted, and ask first. The appearance of a form, framework or institution in DebriefMD does not mean its owner endorses DebriefMD.

3. Recording: the hard rules

3.1 Never record a preceptor who has not agreed

Your preceptor has no DebriefMD account. Nothing in the product asks them for permission, and we never contact them to check. Getting their agreement is something you do in person, in words, before you start.

So: ask, explain, get a yes, then record. In that order, every time. Before they decide, explain:

• that the audio is transcribed and an AI model drafts coaching notes from it;
• who will receive the reviewed note: by default your preceptor is emailed the reviewed note as a PDF with account-free links (a view of the note as sent, an optional rating response, a problem report and a stop link), never the audio or a transcript; and, if you choose "Share with program", your program's and home site's leadership can read it in DebriefMD;
• how long the recording and its transcript are kept.

The consent screen in the product then requires two separate confirmations, both unticked to begin with, before the microphone is used:

1. "I understand how this recording will be processed and shared, and I will avoid patient identifiers."
2. "I confirm my preceptor approved this recording and the AI processing and recipients I explained to them."

They are stored with the time you gave them and the version and language of the disclosure you were shown. They document the conversation. They are not a replacement for it, the preceptor-approval checkbox is an attestation about recording and processing, not your preceptor's approval of the notes that will later be drafted, and ticking either when it is not true is a false statement to us.

If you are faculty recording a closing conversation with a resident, the same rules apply with the roles reversed, and you must use the separate disclosure and confirmations DebriefMD shows for that recording.

You must not:

• Record covertly, or leave a recording running without the other person's knowledge.
• Treat silence, or a previous session's agreement, as agreement for this session.
• Continue recording after someone asks you to stop.
• Pressure, mislead, or rush anyone into agreeing.

If a preceptor withdraws their agreement, during the conversation or afterwards, stop recording. Discard the recording if it has not yet uploaded; otherwise ask us to delete it. If they decline, do not record; use your program's usual way of documenting feedback without a recording.

3.2 Never record a patient encounter

DebriefMD is for feedback conversations that happen after a clinical encounter, between you and your preceptor, about your performance.

You must not use DebriefMD to record:

• a consultation, examination, procedure, or any other encounter with a patient;
• a conversation with a patient's family, substitute decision-maker, or caregiver;
• handover, rounds, case conference, or any clinical discussion where the subject is the patient's care rather than your performance;
• anything at all while a patient is present, or within earshot.

There is no exception to this rule, including where a patient says they do not mind. DebriefMD is not built, tested, or authorised for capturing patient encounters.

3.3 Never deliberately introduce identifying patient data

DebriefMD automatically removes patient identifiers from transcripts, after transcription. It runs a pattern-matching pass covering every HIPAA identifier category plus Canadian identifiers: SIN, provincial health card numbers (BC PHN, OHIP, RAMQ, Alberta PHN), postal codes, hospital identifiers, and room or bed numbers; the exact pattern table is in the code. Then it runs a language-model pass for contextual identifiers such as bare names, then the pattern pass again as a safety net. The audio and the raw transcript are processed before any of this, and the passes can miss things.

That protection exists because preceptors sometimes let a detail slip: "remember that patient in room 214". It is a safety net for accidental disclosure, and it does not supply authority to record that you did not have.

It is not permission to introduce identifiers deliberately. You must not:

• Say a patient's name, health card number, chart number, date of birth, address, phone number, or any other identifier into a recording.
• Read a patient record, chart note, requisition, or wristband aloud.
• Paste patient-identifying text into any DebriefMD field, including the fields you edit during review.
• Try to defeat, evade, or test the scrubbing, for example by spelling identifiers out, spacing them, or encoding them.

Talk about your performance. Describe the case in general clinical terms if you need context. Do not name anyone.

4. Account rules

You must not:

• Share your account or your sign-in link with anyone.
• Use another person's account, or sign in as anyone other than yourself.
• Register with a false name, a false institution, a false level of training, or an email address you do not control.
• Create an account if you are not a medical trainee at an accredited program, program or site faculty holding a membership your program or site has granted, or DebriefMD support staff (Terms of Service, section 3).
• Keep using DebriefMD after your institution has told you not to.

Assessment documents produced through DebriefMD carry your identity into your training record. Accurate identity is not a formality.

5. Assessment integrity

You must not use DebriefMD output to misrepresent an assessment. Review every note before you export, download, share or send it. Specifically, you must not:

• Export or submit an assessment you have not read and verified against what your preceptor actually said.
• Edit an assessment so that it says something more favourable than the feedback you received, including a better rating, and then present it as your preceptor's judgement.
• Present AI-generated draft text as a verbatim quotation from your preceptor.
• Fabricate a session, by recording yourself or a friend and passing it off as preceptor feedback.
• Submit the same feedback conversation as multiple separate assessments to inflate volume.
• Attribute an assessment to a preceptor who did not give the feedback.
• Present your own review, a preceptor's optional response, and a faculty signature as anything other than what each is, or a response to one version as covering another.

Faculty must review and approve a rotation report's ratings and conclusions themselves before signing it. No one may use DebriefMD output for patient care.

DebriefMD drafts. You verify. What you submit is your representation, and your program, school, and college hold you to it. Misrepresenting an assessment is a professionalism matter well beyond anything we can adjudicate, and we will cooperate with an institution investigating one where we have the authority to do so.

6. Rules about the platform

You must not:

• Reverse-engineer, decompile, or disassemble any part of DebriefMD.
• Scrape, crawl, or bulk-extract data from the service.
• Attempt to access another user's sessions, recordings, transcripts, or assessments, including by manipulating identifiers in URLs or API requests.
• Impersonate another person, or misuse an access grant or a link sent to someone else.
• Probe, scan, or test the security of the service without written permission. Good-faith vulnerability reports are welcome at hello@debriefmd.ca; see section 9.
• Circumvent authentication, rate limits, file-type restrictions, size limits, or any other technical control.
• Upload malware, or content that is not audio from a feedback conversation.
• Use automated systems to create accounts or generate sessions.
• Resell, sublicense, or provide DebriefMD to third parties as a service.
• Use DebriefMD or its output to train, fine-tune, or evaluate a machine-learning model, or use recordings, transcripts or notes for research unrelated to your own training, without the authority and approvals that use requires.
• Interfere with the service's operation, or with other users' use of it.

7. Rules about other people

You must not use DebriefMD to harass, defame, or retaliate against anyone. In particular, you must not use a recording or transcript to embarrass a preceptor, to build a case against a colleague, or to circulate someone's words outside the assessment purpose they agreed to.

This does not restrict a lawful complaint, a report the law protects, a request to access or correct personal information, a response to lawful process, or keeping evidence for any of these.

If a preceptor asks what happened to a recording of them, tell them honestly. If they ask you to delete it, discard it if it has not yet uploaded, and otherwise ask us to delete it.

8. Reporting a violation or an incident

If you become aware of a violation of this policy, including one you committed yourself, report it to hello@debriefmd.ca.

If you suspect information has been disclosed to someone who should not have it, for example a note sent to the wrong person or patient information in a transcript, report it promptly to hello@debriefmd.ca, and follow your institution's escalation rules, including telling its privacy office. (breach notification process, to be confirmed)

Reporting a violation you committed, promptly and honestly, will be treated as a mitigating factor.

9. Security research

We welcome good-faith vulnerability reports at hello@debriefmd.ca and aim to respond within five business days.

Good faith means four things. Do not access, modify, or exfiltrate other users' data. Do not degrade the service. Do not use real patient or preceptor data in testing; use synthetic data. Give us reasonable time to fix an issue before disclosing it. Research conducted on those terms, and testing within a written scope we have agreed, is not a violation of section 6.

10. Consequences of violation

Depending on what happened and how serious it is, we may:

1. Contact you for an explanation.
2. Remove or quarantine the offending content.
3. Suspend your account temporarily.
4. Terminate your account.
5. Report the matter to your program, institution, or professional regulator, where we have the authority to do so.
6. Report the matter to a privacy commissioner or law enforcement, where we are required to or where the conduct warrants it.

Enforcement is not a way of erasing records. We will not delete records because of a suspension or termination where the law requires them to be kept, or while they are relevant to an open complaint, investigation or dispute.

Recording someone without their agreement, recording a patient encounter, or deliberately introducing patient identifiers may result in immediate termination without notice. These are the violations that harm people who never chose to be part of this.

Where practicable, we will give notice and an opportunity to respond before suspending or terminating an account. We will not always be able to.

11. Review of a decision

If your account is suspended or terminated and you believe it was a mistake, write to hello@debriefmd.ca. Set out what happened. We will review the decision and respond in writing.

A review does not suspend a deletion request already in progress, and does not pause any report already made to an institution or regulator.

12. Changes to this policy

We may update this policy. Material changes will be emailed to registered users at or before the time the change takes effect, and never later than the day it is published, and the date at the top of this document will be updated. The email says what changed, in a sentence, and which version of this policy it applies to. After we have notified you of a material change, continued use once it takes effect means you accept it. Continued use is not a substitute for any fresh consent or institutional authorization the law requires for a new purpose, recipient or use of recordings.

13. Governing law and contact

This policy is governed by the laws of British Columbia, Canada, on the terms set out in section 18 of the Terms of Service.

Enforcement and reports: hello@debriefmd.ca Privacy and incident reports: hello@debriefmd.ca Security reports: hello@debriefmd.ca

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