Who we are

Ashwood Health ("Ashwood", "we") provides emergency-department check-in and triage-support software to hospitals and health systems. When Ashwood runs inside a hospital, that hospital is the health information custodian of your personal health information under Ontario’s Personal Health Information Protection Act (PHIPA), and Ashwood processes information only on the hospital’s behalf and instructions, as its service provider.

This policy explains what the Ashwood software collects, how it is used, and the choices you have. It applies to the public website, the patient check-in experience, and the staff dashboards.

What we collect

Patient check-in: name, date of birth, contact details, optionally a health card number, physical characteristics relevant to care (height and weight), your answers to the symptom interview, and - once you are seen - vitals and triage notes recorded by clinical staff.

Website and demo requests: the information you submit on our contact and demo forms (name, work email, organization, role), plus standard technical logs (IP address, browser type, pages visited) used for security and troubleshooting.

How the AI interview works

The symptom interview is conducted by a language model (Anthropic’s Claude, via API). The model acts as a scribe: it asks questions and converts your answers into structured clinical findings. It does not decide your triage level - that decision is made by deterministic, versioned rules implementing the Canadian Triage and Acuity Scale, reviewed by clinicians, and every result records exactly which criteria produced it.

Interview content is sent to Anthropic solely to generate the next question and the structured summary. Under Anthropic’s commercial API terms, this data is not used to train their models. Our API keys and prompts live only on our servers and are never exposed to your browser.

How information is used

Patient information is used for one purpose: getting you triaged and treated - building your triage record, ordering the waiting-room queue, and giving your care team an accurate picture before they see you. We do not sell personal information, use it for advertising, or use patient data to train AI models.

Storage, security and retention

Data is stored in a managed PostgreSQL database (Supabase) and encrypted in transit. Access to patient records is restricted to the care team at the deploying site; server-side credentials never reach the browser, staff surfaces are access-controlled, and our public endpoints are rate-limited and monitored for abuse.

Retention periods for clinical records are set by the deploying hospital in accordance with its record-keeping obligations. Demonstration environments contain fictitious data only and are purged regularly.

Sharing

We share information only with: (1) the care team at the site where you checked in; (2) service providers that host or process data for us under contractual confidentiality and data-protection obligations (currently our database/hosting provider and Anthropic for the interview step); and (3) authorities where the law requires it. Nothing is shared for marketing.

Your rights

You may decline to use self-service check-in at any time and register with the triage desk instead - you receive the same care either way. For access to or correction of your health record, contact the hospital where you were seen (as custodian, it holds the record). For questions about this policy or Ashwood’s handling of data, contact us through the details below.

Changes and contact

We will update this policy as the product evolves and note the date of the latest revision above. Material changes affecting a deployed site are communicated to that site in advance.