Privacy & Data Use

When you complete a Clinical Empathy assessment, the completed response is stored so the project can review aggregate patterns and evaluate how the assessment is working during the pilot.

The stored assessment record includes the assessment type and version, the questionnaire used, your selected response values, calculated dimension and overall scores, and the completion time. The assessment itself does not ask for your name or email address.

A response that does not ask for your name should not be treated as guaranteed anonymous. Please avoid entering identifying information anywhere the site offers optional free text.

Patient and caregiver checkups can include optional private reflections. These notes are kept in your browser session by default and are not included in the scored assessment response.

A reflection is sent to the Clinical Empathy database only when you explicitly select the option to share that individual reflection for research. A shared reflection is stored separately from the assessment response together with its question and communication area, the selected answer context, the assessment version, and a consent timestamp.

If you choose to share a reflection, do not include names, dates of birth, hospital or patient numbers, addresses, or other information that could identify a patient, clinician, caregiver, or other person.

The clinician checkup may ask for optional feedback after the assessment. The pilot-feedback record can include a usefulness rating, whether the result felt accurate, and an optional improvement comment. The feedback form does not ask for identity or contact details.

At the end of Resource Library articles, you can optionally answer whether the resource was useful. If you choose Not quite, you may select one of four fixed reasons. This feedback stores the resource, your answer, the selected reason if applicable, and the submission date. We do not ask for a name, account, contact details, free-text comments, or medical information.

To limit automated misuse, the database temporarily records a salted, one-way fingerprint derived from the requesting IP address; the raw IP address is not stored in the feedback or rate-limit tables. These technical anti-abuse records are routinely removed after approximately 48 to 72 hours. The site also remembers in your browser that you already responded to a specific resource, to avoid accidentally asking you to vote again.

If you sign up for Clinical Empathy updates, the site stores the email address you provide together with the audience category you select and the part of the site from which you subscribed. Newsletter records are maintained separately from assessment and pilot-research responses. Subscriptions remain active until you unsubscribe; each newsletter contains a link to remove your subscription. You can also request removal at hello@clinicalempathy.org.

If you use the contact form, the name, email address, subject, and message you provide are sent to Clinical Empathy by email so the project can read and respond to your inquiry. Contact-message contents are not added to the Clinical Empathy application database or to assessment or research-response datasets.

To reduce automated abuse, the contact form uses a hidden honeypot, a minimum form-completion time, and submission rate limits. The persistent rate-limit record stores a salted fingerprint derived from the caller IP address and a one-way key derived from the submitted email address; it does not store the raw IP address or raw email address in the rate-limit table.

Please do not use the contact form for urgent medical matters or include patient-identifying, confidential, or other sensitive clinical information.

While you are completing an assessment, answer progress is stored in browser session storage so the current session can continue. Private patient and caregiver reflections are also stored in session storage unless you explicitly choose to share a reflection.

If you choose “Save Results,” a summary of that result is stored locally in that browser. Browser-local information is controlled by that browser and can be removed by clearing the relevant site data.

On the production website, Clinical Empathy uses Umami Cloud to understand visits and improve its content. Umami receives page paths without URL search query parameters, as well as referring-page information, browser and device characteristics, and approximate geographic information. This helps prevent private newsletter unsubscribe tokens and other URL query values from reaching Umami via tracked page addresses. It does not use tracking cookies.

When visitors use the Resource Library or site-wide search, Clinical Empathy also sends completed search terms, result counts (including searches with no matches), and the public resources or results opened to Umami. These search terms can reveal topics of interest. Please do not enter names, private patient details, or sensitive health information into search fields. Assessment answers, voluntarily shared reflections, and contact-form messages are not deliberately sent to Umami as search event properties.

To exclude future visits from analytics in your current browser, visit https://clinicalempathy.org/analytics-preferences and choose Exclude my visits. This setting applies separately to each browser and can be reset if that browser clears its site data.

Pilot assessment responses, clinician feedback, and explicitly shared reflections are used to evaluate the clarity, usefulness, reliability, and user experience of Clinical Empathy's educational tools and to inform revisions to those tools.

The assessments are educational reflection tools. They are not validated measures of clinical competence, quality of care, or population standing, and stored pilot responses are not intended for credentialing or fitness-to-practise decisions.

Clinical Empathy retains pilot assessment responses, clinician feedback, and explicitly shared research reflections for evaluation, educational research, and improvement of its tools. These forms do not ask for names or email addresses, but individual responses, particularly optional free text, cannot be assumed to be fully anonymous. Where records contain personal information, they are retained only as long as necessary for the stated purposes, with appropriate safeguards and applicable privacy rights.

Genuinely anonymized research data and aggregate findings may be kept long-term for future research and quality improvement. Newsletter subscriptions are managed separately and remain subject to the unsubscribe arrangements described above.

Clinical Empathy uses Supabase for its application database and authentication. Public assessment and feedback features can submit the information needed for those features; administrative access to stored responses is restricted through authenticated Admin functionality and database access controls.

No online service can promise absolute security. Clinical Empathy aims to collect only the information needed for the functions described on this page and to avoid collecting unnecessary identifying information in the assessment process.

Privacy questions and requests can be sent to hello@clinicalempathy.org.

Because the assessments do not ask for a name or email address, it may not always be possible to identify a particular assessment response as belonging to a particular person. This limitation will be taken into account when responding to access or deletion requests.

This notice may change as Clinical Empathy moves beyond the pilot, adds or removes features, or defines additional operational policies. Material changes will be reflected on this page with an updated date.