Terms of Service

1. What these terms cover

These Terms of Service ("Terms") are an agreement between you and 1581455 B.C. Ltd., a company incorporated under the Business Corporations Act (British Columbia) and doing business as WhiteCoat Prep ("DebriefMD", "we", "us"). They cover your use of DebriefMD at debriefmd.ca and app.debriefmd.ca and any related services. DebriefMD is a product offering of WhiteCoat Prep.

By creating an account or using DebriefMD, you agree to these Terms and to the Acceptable Use Policy, which is part of this agreement. The Legal Disclaimer is incorporated by reference: it explains what DebriefMD is not and what it cannot promise, these Terms rely on it, and it is not a document you are asked to accept separately. If you do not agree, do not use DebriefMD.

How we handle personal information is described in the Privacy Policy, which is published separately.

2. What DebriefMD does

DebriefMD records verbal feedback that a supervising clinician (a "preceptor") gives you after a clinical encounter. It transcribes that recording, runs an automated pass to remove patient identifiers from the transcript, and uses a language model to draft coaching notes mapped to your program's form fields. Authorized faculty can also use it to prepare rotation reports, including from a recorded closing conversation with a resident.

People make the decisions, not the software:

• You review the draft. You edit it, and nothing can be exported or sent until you have reviewed it.
• A preceptor's response is optional. It applies only to the version that was sent to them. No response is not agreement.
• Faculty sign rotation reports after reviewing them, and enter the ratings and conclusions themselves.

DebriefMD makes no competence, progression or pass/fail decision. It does not file anything in your program's official assessment system, or anywhere else, on its own, and it does not replace that system. Reviewed material becomes visible to your program only through an action you take for that purpose; section 8 says which.

3. Who can use DebriefMD

DebriefMD is intended for medical trainees, meaning residents, fellows, and medical students at accredited medical schools and residency programs. Three kinds of account exist: a trainee account, which records debriefs; a program or site faculty account, held by a director, associate director or administrator whose program or teaching site has granted them a membership, which sees that program's dashboards and what its residents have released and can prepare and sign rotation reports; and a support staff account, granted directly by us, which reads support requests. Preceptors do not hold accounts (section 5). They may receive account-free links in an email a resident sends them without becoming users.

The public demo at /demo needs no account. Using it is still use of DebriefMD under these Terms and the Acceptable Use Policy, and the Privacy Policy's public-demo section says what happens to a demo recording.

To create an account you must confirm all of the following:

1. You are a medical trainee at an accredited program, or faculty or support staff holding one of the grants above.
2. You are of legal age to enter into a binding contract in your province or territory.
3. You are permitted by your institution, your program, and any applicable professional or hospital policy to capture and process clinical feedback in the way DebriefMD works.

Point 3 is your responsibility, not ours. Some institutions restrict recording in clinical settings. Some restrict third-party tools for assessment material. Some require prior approval. We cannot know your institution's rules. Check them before you record. Having a DebriefMD account does not mean your institution has approved DebriefMD.

Where your institution has a signed agreement with us for DebriefMD, that agreement governs the matters it covers, such as institutional instructions, authorized roles, custody and control of records, retention, service commitments and exit arrangements, and prevails over these Terms on those matters, subject to individual rights that the law does not allow to be waived.

4. Your account

You must register with accurate information: your real name, an email address you control, and your actual program, specialty, and level of training. DebriefMD uses this to produce assessment documents that carry your identity into your training record. Inaccurate account information produces inaccurate assessment records.

You are responsible for everything done through your account.

Accounts are individual. You may not share credentials, share a magic-link sign-in email, or let another person use your account. If you believe someone else has accessed your account, tell us at hello@debriefmd.ca promptly.

If you change the notification email on your profile, we send a confirmation link to the new address and only start using it once you click that link. This is deliberate. Assessment notifications must not be redirectable to an address you do not control.

5. Consent to record: your responsibility

This is the most important obligation in these Terms.

Your preceptor does not have a DebriefMD account. DebriefMD never contacts them to ask permission, and there is no screen anywhere in the product where a preceptor agrees to anything. Consent to record is a conversation between two people in a hospital, and you are the one who has to have it.

So the sequence is fixed, and it is this:

1. You ask your preceptor, out loud, before you start recording. Explain what you are recording and what it is for; that the audio is transcribed and an AI model drafts coaching notes from it; who will receive the reviewed note (see "Tell them what they will receive" below); and how long the recording and transcript are kept (section 8).
2. They say yes. Silence, hesitation, or agreement to an earlier session is not a yes.
3. Only then do you open DebriefMD and record.

Before each recording, DebriefMD shows you a disclosure and requires two separate confirmations before it requests microphone access. Both start unticked:

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."

These checkboxes are not the consent. They are your record of it. The consent was given verbally, by your preceptor, before the microphone was on. Ticking the boxes is you telling us that conversation happened. They record your attestations; they are not your preceptor's signature, and they are not their approval of the coaching note or of any assessment later drafted from the recording. We store the disclosure version and language you were shown, both confirmations and when you gave them, including for a recording made offline and uploaded later. A recording made before the two confirmations existed keeps the single confirmation it was made under; we do not infer the second one for it.

You must:

• Ask your preceptor before you start recording, never after.
• Explain the recording, the AI processing, the recipients and the retention before they decide.
• Not pressure, mislead, or rush anyone into agreeing.
• Stop recording if they withdraw agreement at any point. Discard the recording if it has not yet uploaded; otherwise ask us to delete it (section 11). If they decline, do not record; use your program's usual way of documenting feedback without a recording.
• Never record a preceptor covertly, and never leave a recording running once the feedback conversation ends.

You must not record patients, patient encounters, rounds, handover, or any conversation that is about a patient's care rather than about your performance. The Acceptable Use Policy has the full list.

Tell them what they will receive. When you press "Save and send" after reviewing a note, DebriefMD emails the reviewed note as a PDF to the recipients your send preferences name, and your preceptor is one of them by default. Their email carries the PDF and account-free links: a view of the note as sent, an optional rating response, a problem report and a stop link. It never carries the audio or a transcript. You can change who receives what in Settings, unless your program has set a policy. Tell them, too, whether you will share the reviewed note with your program, which lets your program's leadership read it in DebriefMD (section 8). Privacy Policy section 11 lists every recipient.

Faculty recording a closing conversation. If you are faculty recording a rotation's closing conversation with a resident, the roles are reversed: the resident must agree before you record, and DebriefMD shows you a separate disclosure and two confirmations written for that situation. The obligations in this section apply to you in the same way.

We rely on your attestations. We have no way to verify independently that the other person agreed. If you record someone who has not agreed, that is your act and not ours, and you are responsible for it. That includes responsibility under any applicable criminal, privacy, employment, professional-conduct, or institutional rules. It does not move to you our own responsibility for how DebriefMD handles and safeguards a recording once it reaches us, or your institution's responsibility for its own approvals and assessment decisions.

6. Acceptable use

Your use of DebriefMD is governed by the Acceptable Use Policy. Breaching it is a breach of these Terms and may lead to suspension or termination under section 12.

7. AI-generated content is a draft, not a finding

DebriefMD uses automated speech-to-text and a large language model to produce transcripts and structured assessment content. These systems make mistakes. They mishear words. They misattribute statements. They miss nuance. They can produce plausible text that the preceptor never said.

Accordingly:

1. Everything DebriefMD produces is a draft. It is a starting point for your review, not a finished assessment.
2. You are the quality gate. Before you export, submit, or share anything DebriefMD produced, you must read it and confirm it accurately reflects what your preceptor actually said. The product is built around this: the review screen records whether you reviewed and whether you edited, and an edit after review clears that review.
3. You are responsible for what you export or share. Once you export a document it is your document, carrying your name, entering your training record. Saving or downloading a personal copy does not newly grant program access; sharing a reviewed note with your program does (section 8).
4. Identifier removal happens after transcription, and it is not perfect. The speech-to-text service receives the original audio before any identifier is removed, and the stored audio and the raw transcript are identifiable. DebriefMD then removes patient identifiers in three stages: a pattern-matching pass, a language-model pass for contextual identifiers (which can receive identifiers the first pass missed), and the pattern pass again. The raw transcript and the redacted transcript are separate records. This substantially reduces identifiers but cannot be guaranteed to catch everything; an unusual name with no title in front of it, for example, may survive. If the language-model pass did not complete, export is held until it does. Redaction does not make an assessment about you anonymous: it is still a record about a named trainee. Do not treat a DebriefMD transcript as certified de-identified. Read it.

Section 7 is expanded in the Legal Disclaimer, which also covers what DebriefMD is not. It is not medical advice, not a medical device, and not a substitute for your program's requirements or your own judgement.

8. Where your data lives, who receives it, and how long we keep it

This is a summary. The Privacy Policy is the authoritative statement, and its section 11 lists every recipient of every email and every screen a director can open. Where this section and that one differ, that one is right.

• Location. DebriefMD's own hosting, database, object storage, message queue, pipeline compute, email sending, speech recognition (Amazon Transcribe) and AI processing (Amazon Bedrock) are configured in AWS's Montréal, Québec region (ca-central-1). That statement covers the services we control. It does not cover copies outside them: a recording or list held in your browser, which is wherever your device is; an email in a recipient's mailbox, whose location is set by the recipient's mail provider, not by where we send from; a file you download or export; or a browser used outside Canada. The Privacy Policy and the Sub-processors list describe each. Analytics collection is paused: no analytics script or request loads, even if you opted in before. Google sign-in is not offered.

• Encryption. Data at rest is encrypted with AES-256. The database, object storage, secrets, and the container registry use a customer-managed key with rotation enabled; the message queue uses AWS-managed encryption, and its messages carry file locations rather than content. Data in transit uses TLS 1.3 at our load balancer, and database connections are verified against the Amazon RDS certificate authority. Object storage blocks all public access, and uploads and downloads go through short-lived, ownership-checked presigned URLs.

• Audio. Kept for 30 days after recording, then deleted. It is never emailed to anyone, including your preceptor.

• Transcripts. The raw transcript is deleted 30 days after capture, on the same schedule as the audio. The de-identified transcript, and the assessment drafted from it, are kept until you delete your account or ask us to delete them. Exporting a debrief removes nothing. Privacy Policy section 9 has the full schedule, including the schedules we have not yet verified.

• Access. Every database query that touches your data is limited, in the query itself, to you or to a role authorized to see it. The facts a contract needs:

  1. Nothing you recorded leaves by email until you send it. The emails we send on our own, when a debrief is ready, go to you and to the contacts your program has configured, and carry only your name, the preceptor, the rotation and the date: no note content, no transcript and no audio. Your preceptor is never among them. Content leaves by email only through "Save and send", which you press after reviewing every note in the debrief; through a summary you built yourself; or through a summary schedule you yourself created and can revoke at any time. Every address is resolved on our side, and none is ever taken from the request. Your program may set a send policy that replaces your own preferences, in which case Settings shows the choice as locked. No coaching-note email carries a transcript or audio.
  2. Saving or downloading a personal copy does not newly grant program access. A PDF, spreadsheet, Word, Markdown or handoff file, an approved program-format download, a portfolio export, and the email copies sent by "Save and send" give your program no access in DebriefMD. Share with program is a distinct, confirmed action granting the displayed program and home-site access: it shows you the people in your program's leadership roles and your home site's director or administrator, and does nothing until you confirm. They then read, one resident at a time, a copy of your reviewed notes taken when you shared; a later edit reaches them only if you share again. Email copies have their own recipient preview and do not grant in-app access. Previously released material, including debriefs released under the earlier rule, when a download counted as a release, remains released unless a permitted withdrawal or correction is arranged; there is no button to un-share, so contact your program or us. None of these actions automatically submits anything to an external assessment system. They never see the transcript, your self-ratings, or anything unreviewed. A progress narrative is different: only you can release it, and you can withdraw it yourself.
  3. Rotation reports. A rotation report is signed by faculty after human review. Once signed, it is visible to you and to authorized faculty of your program.
  4. Never emailed or shown to another user: the audio recording and the raw pre-de-identification transcript. Never sent to anyone but you: your self-ratings. Your own copy may include them, because they are yours; no other recipient receives them, whatever your send preferences say.

  Copies already delivered (an email, a downloaded file, a document in your program's systems) are outside DebriefMD and cannot be recalled by us.

• Audit. Mutating actions on sensitive resources are written to an append-only audit log: who, what, when, from where, and the outcome.

9. Applicable privacy law

Which privacy statute applies depends on the information, where you practise, and the role of your institution and of DebriefMD in handling it. We cannot determine that for you, and no single statute governs everything.

• PHIPA (Personal Health Information Protection Act, Ontario) governs personal health information in Ontario.
• PIPEDA (Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act) is the federal private-sector privacy law, where it applies.
• Provincial statutes vary. British Columbia's PIPA covers private organizations, but does not apply where its public-sector law, FIPPA, applies, for example to records under the control of a public body such as a university or health authority. Alberta (HIA / PIPA) and Quebec (Law 25) each have their own frameworks, with materially different rules. Other provinces and territories differ again.

We do not claim to satisfy every provincial regime for every user. Your institution may have obligations of its own, including obligations that require it to approve or refuse the use of a tool like DebriefMD. Where your institution's privacy office has a position, that position governs your use of DebriefMD.

We claim no certification of any kind, and no completed independent audit or penetration test.

10. Ownership

Your contributions remain yours. You keep whatever rights you hold in your recordings, edits, notes and exported documents. We do not claim ownership of them and we do not sell them. Those rights sit alongside, and do not displace, the rights of the other people involved, such as the preceptor whose words are recorded or the faculty member who signs a report, or your institution's custody or control of its assessment records.

We do not use your content to train AI models. The Privacy Policy and the Sub-processors list describe the AI services we use, their terms, and the opt-out settings we have applied and their limits. We disclose your content only to the service providers that process it for us and to the recipients Privacy Policy section 11 describes.

You grant us a limited licence to store, process, transmit, and display your content only as needed to provide DebriefMD to you, make the copies and disclosures you or your program are authorized to receive, and meet our legal obligations. That licence ends when the content is deleted.

Our platform is ours. The DebriefMD software, interface, design, form templates, extraction prompts, documentation, name, and branding remain the property of 1581455 B.C. Ltd. and its licensors. Nothing in these Terms transfers any of it to you. Third-party assessment forms, frameworks and marks that DebriefMD maps to remain their owners'.

Feedback you send us about the product, such as bug reports and feature suggestions, may be used freely by us without obligation or compensation to you.

11. Deleting your data

You may ask us at any time to delete your account and everything associated with it.

You can do this yourself, in the product: Settings → Delete account. It takes effect immediately rather than within a processing window, and you will be asked to type a confirmation phrase first, because it cannot be undone. It removes your profile, your recordings and both transcripts, your assessments and self-ratings, your progress narratives (released ones included), rotation reports about you (signed ones included), recordings you made as faculty, and your support requests.

If you would rather someone actioned it for you, or you want only part of your data removed, such as a single debrief, contact us at hello@debriefmd.ca. We will action the request and confirm completion within 30 days.

There is no control in the product for deleting a single debrief once its audio has been uploaded. The one thing you can remove yourself is a recording still waiting on your device to upload, from the queue; discarding it removes the empty server record with it. Exporting a debrief removes nothing.

What deletion does not reach:

1. Append-only audit log entries recording that an action occurred. These are kept for security and privacy-compliance purposes and contain no assessment content or transcript text. They do not keep your name or your email: the link to your account is removed and an internal reference code remains, so the log stays internally consistent. We do not call these entries anonymous; they still show a sequence of actions by one person.
2. Requests to stop receiving email, which belong to the address that made them and are kept so the emails do not resume.
3. Database backups, until their 7-day cycle rolls off.
4. Copies already delivered. Once a PDF, spreadsheet or email has left DebriefMD, whether into your program's assessment system, a recipient's inbox, or your own files, we cannot reach it and cannot delete or recall it.

Privacy Policy section 10 sets out these limits and your other rights.

12. Suspension and termination

You may stop using DebriefMD at any time.

We may suspend or terminate your access if:

• you breach these Terms or the Acceptable Use Policy;
• we are required to by law, by a court, or by a regulator;
• your institution withdraws permission for you to use DebriefMD; or
• we discontinue the service.

Where circumstances allow, we will give notice and a reasonable opportunity to export your data first. Where a breach involves recording without consent, or risk to patient privacy, we may act immediately and without notice.

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

If we discontinue DebriefMD entirely, we will give you at least (notice period, to be confirmed) notice and a means to export your assessment data before shutdown.

13. Service availability

DebriefMD is provided on an "as is" and "as available" basis. We do not currently offer a service-level agreement, an uptime guarantee, or a guaranteed support response time. (support / response commitment, to be confirmed)

Processing can fail. Recordings can fail to upload. Sessions that stall are automatically marked as failed. Keep your own notes on important feedback conversations. Do not treat DebriefMD as the only record of a conversation you cannot afford to lose.

14. Disclaimer of warranties

To the maximum extent permitted by law, DebriefMD is provided without warranties of any kind, express or implied, including implied warranties of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, accuracy, and non-infringement.

We do not warrant that transcripts will be accurate, that extracted assessment content will be correct or complete, that identifier scrubbing will remove every identifier, or that any residency program, medical school, college, or regulatory body will accept a document produced through DebriefMD.

Some jurisdictions do not allow the exclusion of certain warranties. Where that is the case, this section applies to the maximum extent the law allows.

15. Limitation of liability

To the maximum extent permitted by law:

1. We are not liable for indirect, incidental, special, consequential, exemplary, or punitive damages, or for lost data, lost opportunity, lost profits, reputational harm, or academic or professional consequences, however caused.
2. We are not liable for any clinical decision made in reliance on, or in connection with, anything produced by DebriefMD. DebriefMD has no role in patient care and its output must never be used to make one.
3. We are not liable for consequences arising from your recording of a person who did not agree to be recorded, or from your recording of a patient encounter. These Terms prohibit both.
4. We are not liable for an assessment being rejected, disputed, or treated as invalid by your program, school, college, or regulator.
5. Our total aggregate liability for all claims arising out of or relating to these Terms or your use of DebriefMD is limited to the greater of (a) the total amount you paid us for DebriefMD in the twelve months before the event giving rise to the claim, or (b) CAD $100.

Nothing in this section limits liability that cannot be limited by law, including liability for fraud or for death or personal injury caused by negligence.

16. Indemnity

You agree to indemnify and hold harmless 1581455 B.C. Ltd., its directors, officers, employees, and contractors from any claim, demand, loss, liability, or expense (including reasonable legal fees) to the extent it arises from:

• your breach of these Terms or the Acceptable Use Policy;
• your recording of any person without their agreement;
• your recording of a patient encounter, or your capture of patient information beyond what is incidental to feedback about your performance;
• your export, submission, or sharing of DebriefMD output that you did not verify; or
• your breach of any institutional policy, professional obligation, or law that applies to you.

This indemnity does not apply to the extent a claim results from our own breach of these Terms or of the law, our negligence or wilful misconduct, or a failure of the safeguards we are responsible for. It does not transfer to you any duty the law places on us that cannot be transferred.

17. Changes to these Terms

We may update these Terms. When a change is material, we will email registered users at or before the time the change takes effect, and never later than the day it is published, and update the date at the top of this document. The email says what changed, in a sentence, and which version of these Terms it applies to.

After we have notified you of a material change, continued use of DebriefMD once it takes effect means you accept the updated Terms. If you do not accept them, stop using DebriefMD and ask us to delete your data under section 11. Where we hold a record of the version you accepted, you can see it in your settings.

Continued use is not a substitute for consent. If a change introduces a new purpose for processing, a new recipient, or a new use of recordings, we will first obtain any fresh consent or institutional authorization the law requires.

The consent disclosure shown before recording is versioned separately, and the version you agreed to is stored with each recording session.

18. General

• Governing law. These Terms are governed by the laws of British Columbia, Canada, and by the federal laws of Canada that apply there, without regard to conflict-of-laws rules. The courts of British Columbia have exclusive jurisdiction, subject to any non-waivable right you have to bring a claim in your own province.
• Rights you keep. Nothing in these Terms or the Acceptable Use Policy limits your right to access or correct your personal information under privacy law, whether or not the product shows it to you; to complain to us, your institution, a privacy commissioner or another authority; to make a report the law protects; or to respond to lawful process.
• Severability. If any provision is found unenforceable, the rest stays in force, and the unenforceable provision is narrowed to the minimum extent needed to make it enforceable.
• No waiver. Not enforcing a provision on one occasion does not waive it.
• Assignment. You may not assign these Terms. We may assign them to a successor in connection with a merger, acquisition, or sale of assets, on notice to you.
• Entire agreement. These Terms, the Acceptable Use Policy, the Legal Disclaimer, and the Privacy Policy are the entire agreement between you and us about DebriefMD, subject to any institutional agreement under section 3.

19. Contact

Legal notices: hello@debriefmd.ca Privacy requests, for the attention of our Privacy Officer: hello@debriefmd.ca Security reports: hello@debriefmd.ca Registered address: 1130 East Broadway, Vancouver, British Columbia

1581455 B.C. Ltd. dba WhiteCoat Prep