03/16/2026
This is a comment from someone else in a group I belong to, I’m posting it here for awareness purposes.
I strongly believe in patient privacy, sometimes a patient’s or client’s privacy has been taken from them in one way or another and they’re therapy because of it - sometimes their right to privacy is the only thing they feel they have left. If I compromise on their privacy, then I am compromising their dignity. Protecting privacy is extremely important.
I think everyone who is a consumer of a healthcare service, to include therapy, has the right to know which electronic medical record (EMR) their healthcare provider uses. You can then look the EMR up on the internet, see what if any legal actions the EMR has been involved in, and you as the consumer have the right to decide if you are comfortable with how your records are created, collected and stored. Ask questions, do your own research - it’s your right!
HMC uses TherapyNotes (TN). I don’t know of any legal actions involving TN.
This also extends to onsite records storage as well. Who has access to your records? All hard copy medical records should be behind two locks, access should be restricted to “need to know”, which refers to HIPAA’s minimum necessary rule. HMC moved into a paperless model a few years back, and we store all records in TN. Access to charts is restricted to only the assigned clinicians, and our admin staff do not access under their logins to see notes. If there is a reason to keep a hard copy patient record, we do have locked filing cabinets we can use.
TN is not owned by venture capitalists. Most EMRs are. So are most therapy platforms. Venture capitalists are there for the profit, they aren’t there to protect your rights. HMC is contracted with Lyra and Spring Health, and they are both owned by venture capitalists. We store all Lyra patient records in TN, however Spring Health does require us to store documentation in their own platform, which is called Compass. Spring Health is AI-powered and they have an AI Advisory Council which ensures internal ethics reviews and clinical validation processes are being conducted and that there are strict data access controls in place. That being said - they retain ownership of all data, and I don’t know what exactly that will mean in the future.
And to think I began my work in this field with manila folders and printer paper… 🫠
