This policy explains what Refresh Health does with information about you. It is written to be read, not to be got past. If anything here is unclear, the contact details at the end are real and answered.
It covers the Refresh Health service as offered in the United States.
It matters which of these you are using, because the rules are not the same.
| What it is | Who is responsible | |
|---|---|---|
| This website | Our public pages, and the form you can use to contact us. | Refresh Health. This policy governs it. |
| The clinical platform and the patient app | Your medical record, your measurements, and the app your practice connects to your chart. | Your healthcare practice. We hold that information for them and act only on their instructions. |
In short: information you give this website is ours to look after. Information in your medical record belongs to the practice treating you.
Your healthcare practice decides what is recorded about you, why, and who may see it. Under United States health privacy law that makes the practice the covered entity — the party responsible for your record — and Refresh Health its business associate, acting only on its instructions and under a written agreement.
Refresh Health provides the software the practice uses. We process your information only on their instructions and for no purpose of our own. We do not sell it, rent it, or use it for advertising. We do not use it to train anything for anybody else. Each practice’s information is kept separate from every other practice’s.
The contact form collects what you type into it — your name, your email address, and whatever you tell us — and we use it to answer you and for nothing else.
The form is delivered to us by Formspree, which passes the message on and does not use it for anything of its own.
Please do not send medical details through it. It is an ordinary enquiry form, not a way into your record. If you have a question about your care, speak to your practice.
This website sets one cookie, which keeps your session working while you are on the site and is discarded afterwards. There is no analytics, no advertising pixel, and no tracking of you across other websites. Nothing on this site reports your visit to another company.
When you record a measurement in the app — a blood pressure, a weight, a blood glucose, an oxygen level or a heart rate — the app sends:
That is all of it. The app does not attach your name, your date of birth or anything else to a measurement: whose reading it is comes from your sign-in, not from the message itself.
The app reads health measurements from Apple Health (on iPhone) and Health Connect (on Android), so that readings you have already taken — on a blood pressure cuff, a scale, an oximeter or a glucose meter that writes to your phone — can reach your practice without you typing them in again.
It reads the kinds of measurement this service is for: blood pressure, weight, blood glucose, oxygen saturation and heart rate. It does not read your whole health record, and it does not write to it.
This happens only after you have given permission on the phone itself, and you can withdraw that permission at any time in your phone’s settings — in Settings → Health → Data Access & Devices on iPhone, or in Health Connect on Android. Withdrawing it stops the app reading anything further; measurements already sent to your practice remain part of your medical record.
Health information read from your phone is used only to place it in your medical record for your practice. It is never used for advertising, marketing, or any form of data mining, by us or by anybody else.
The app uses AWS AppSync, a service of Amazon Web Services, to communicate with our servers. Amazon processes that traffic on our behalf under contract and does not use it for its own purposes.
There is no advertising software in the app, and nothing in it profiles you.
The app receives the name of your practice and your own initials. It is not sent your full name, your date of birth or your address.
When your practice connects your phone, the app creates a key inside the phone’s own secure hardware. That key never leaves the phone and cannot be copied off it. Your phone is also given a random identifier so the service can tell one connected phone from another.
Signing in produces a pass that lasts fifteen minutes and is then renewed. If your phone is lost or stolen, your practice can disconnect it, and it stops working on its very next request.
Because this is a medical record, we must be able to answer “who looked at this?”. We therefore keep a record of every attempt to sign in — successful or not — and of your chart being connected to a phone and each time that phone reads your record afterwards.
These records exist to protect you. They are never used to build a profile of you, and never for marketing.
Your information is held on servers we operate at Amazon Web Services in Northern Virginia, United States. It stays in the United States.
Amazon acts as our sub-processor under a written agreement: it stores and moves the information and makes no use of it. Information is encrypted while it travels and while it is stored.
| Who | Why |
|---|---|
| Your healthcare practice | They are treating you. Your measurements appear in your medical record. |
| Refresh Health | We run the software for them, on their instructions. |
| Amazon Web Services | They host our servers, in the United States, and make no use of what is on them. |
| Formspree | They deliver messages sent through the contact form on this website. They receive nothing from the app. |
| Anyone else | No one, except where the law compels us. Your health information is never sold, rented, or used for advertising. |
Your measurements form part of your medical record, and your practice keeps that record for as long as the law requires them to.
The sign-in and access records described above are kept for six years, which is the period United States health privacy rules require for records of this kind, and are then deleted.
You can ask to:
Ask your practice first, since they hold your record. You can also write to us at support@refresh.health and we will help. We answer requests within thirty days.
Several states give their residents further rights — among them California, Virginia, Colorado, Connecticut and Texas. These generally include the right to know what is held about you, to have it corrected or deleted, to obtain a copy, and not to be treated worse for asking. Washington’s My Health My Data Act applies specifically to health information.
To exercise any of these, write tosupport@refresh.health. We will not refuse you service, charge you differently, or give you a lesser standard of care for having asked.
Browsers can send a “Do Not Track” signal. There is still no agreed standard for what a website should do with it, so we do not respond to it. This site does not track you in any case.
This app is given to a patient by their healthcare practice. Where the patient is a child, the practice arranges access with a parent or guardian, and the same protections in this policy apply.
If this policy changes in a way that affects you, we will update the date at the top and say what changed. The previous version stays available on request.