Written by Wani Sharma, Owl Practice’s Product Manager
More clinicians are using AI to help with documentation, and I think that’s a good thing. Used well, it takes admin work off their plate. Notes get done faster, workflows get simpler, and clinicians get some of their day back.
But the more I talk to customers, the more I notice their questions aren’t really about what the AI can do. They’re about what happens to the conversation after the session ends.
How long are transcripts kept? Who owns them? Is any of this used to train a model? Can a transcript be deleted, and what happens to it a year from now?
I get versions of these questions constantly, on customer calls, in industry threads, at conferences. They’re the same questions I’d ask. None of them are about whether the AI can write a decent note. They’re about trust, and in mental healthcare, that’s everything.
At Owl Practice, Your Data Belongs to You
Plenty of tools come with a hidden trade: use the product, and your data stops being fully yours. Owl Practice doesn’t work that way, and never will.
Smart Notes follows the same rules as everything else on the Owl Practice platform. Your data belongs to you, full stop. In practice, that means:
- No data is used to train AI models or anything else.
- We do not sell your data to third parties.
- Transcripts are available for 7 days, then automatically deleted for compliance.
- Transcripts can be deleted manually before day 7.
- Recordings are deleted as soon as the transcript is complete.
- All Smart Notes data is secured the same way as the rest of your practice’s information: securely and compliantly, on Canadian servers.
The Conversation We Had Before We Built Anything
When we started building Smart Notes, the first real debate wasn’t about model accuracy or which features to launch. It was about what we were actually comfortable doing with a therapy session once our technology touched it.
That’s the part of building healthcare AI most people never see. Decisions about retention, ownership, and data use happen early, behind the scenes, and they’re easy to defer. We treated them as product requirements instead of compliance footnotes to sort out later.
One idea anchored everything: the customer’s data belongs to the customer. It sounds obvious. Upholding it meant turning down things that would otherwise be convenient.
Why Ownership Isn’t an Abstract Question
A therapy transcript isn’t like other data. People say things in session they may never say anywhere else: about trauma, addiction, grief, their marriage, the worst week of their life. When AI enters that room, even just to help with the note afterward, the clinician needs to trust that the tool respects what was said.
So we made a few deliberate calls.
We don’t train models on customer sessions. That started as an ethical line, not a legal one, though it satisfies both. A Smart Notes transcript exists to do one job: help a clinician write a clinical note. That’s it. A session between a client and their therapist should stay what it was meant to be: a private conversation, not a data set used to improve someone’s model.
Transcripts are deleted automatically after seven days. Seven was a judgment call. Clinicians need a window to review a note, regenerate it, or finalize it after a busy day, and a same-day cutoff was too tight for how people actually work. But there’s no good reason to sit on something this sensitive indefinitely either. Seven days covers the real workflow without turning our servers into a long-term archive of people’s therapy sessions.
Clinicians who don’t need the seven days can delete the transcript the moment the note is generated.
The finished clinical note is different. The clinician reviews it, edits it, signs it, and it becomes part of the client’s record. The transcript is scaffolding. Once the note is built, the scaffolding comes down.
Time Restrictions Strengthen Privacy
Privacy usually gets framed as who can reach your data. Less attention goes to how long it exists at all.
Anything you retain, you’re on the hook to protect for as long as you keep it. More retention means more surface area and more time for something to go wrong. You can’t engineer away every risk, but you can decide which ones are worth carrying. Cutting transcript retention was one we didn’t need to hold onto.
Keep what’s useful, drop what isn’t. Simple to say, but it shaped most of how we built Smart Notes.
Compliance Is the Bare Minimum
Smart Notes supports PIPEDA, PHIPA, and HIPAA. But when you’re evaluating any AI tool for a clinical setting, push past the compliance checklist.
Compliance tells you what a company is required to do. It doesn’t tell you what a company chose to do when no rule forced its hand. That second answer is the one that matters.
So if you’re weighing an AI note-taker, ask the vendor directly: Do you train on our data? How long do you keep transcripts? Can we delete them? Who actually controls the information once it’s in your system?
How they answer tells you how they think about you, your practice, and your clients.
What Trust Is Built On
When a client agrees to AI-assisted notes, they’re not just trusting their clinician. They’re trusting the tool behind the clinician, and the company standing behind that tool, often without realizing how much trust they’re handing over.
The least we can do is explain plainly what we collect, why it exists, how long it lasts, and who controls it.
AI will keep making documentation easier, and I’m glad about that. But lasting adoption won’t come from notes generated a little faster than last year. It comes from clinicians feeling safe using these tools in the moments where privacy matters most.
That safety isn’t something you bolt on at launch. It’s decided long before anyone ships a tool as game-changing as Smart Notes.
Owl Practice’s Smart Notes automate your note taking using privacy compliant AI, so you can spend more time with clients and less time on paperwork. Learn more about Smart Notes.
