Who we are
CareGuide (“CareGuide,” “we,” “us”) provides educational recovery guidance grounded in orthopedic surgeons’ own protocols, through our website, patient portal, and mobile apps (together, the “Service”). This policy explains what information we collect, how we use it, and the choices you have.
CareGuide is an educational tool. It does not provide medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment.
Information we collect
- Account information — your name, email address, password (stored as a salted hash), preferred language, and the providers you link to your account. You provide this directly when you register or edit your settings.
- Recovery and health information you log — daily check-ins (such as pain, confidence, sleep, and notes), your procedure and surgery date when set by your provider, and answers you give in guided flows such as the informed-consent interview. Check-ins and interview answers are entered by you; your procedure and surgery date are entered by your provider.
- Questions and conversations — the questions you ask and the answers you receive, so you can revisit them and so your linked care team can improve their protocols. Anonymous (guest) questions are stored with a session identifier, not an account. If you use dictation in the mobile app, the microphone recording is sent to CareGuide, transcribed, and discarded; only the resulting text is kept.
- Wearables data — if you choose to connect a supported device (such as Whoop or Oura), we store the daily summary metrics the provider shares (for example sleep duration and recovery scores). Access tokens are encrypted at rest, and you can disconnect at any time.
- Usage and device information — standard logs and analytics events (such as pages viewed and features used), collected automatically by our servers and analytics tooling, that help us keep the Service reliable and improve it.
- Consent records — the date and version of the educational-use acknowledgment you accept, and (in the mobile app) your choice to allow or withdraw sharing with the AI providers described below.
How we use information
- To operate the Service and answer your questions using your surgeon’s protocols and published research. Answers are generated by third-party artificial-intelligence models, described in “Artificial-intelligence service providers” below.
- To ask clarifying questions before answering, to remember clinical facts you confirm in chat so we don’t re-ask them, and to run the informed-consent interview.
- To turn microphone recordings into text when you choose to dictate.
- To power your recovery portal — check-ins, recovery score, and recovery plan.
- To let your linked care team see how your recovery is progressing.
- To maintain safety, security, and audit records (for example, your acknowledgment of our educational-use notice).
- To improve the Service, in aggregated or de-identified form wherever possible.
We do not sell your personal information, and we do not use it for third-party advertising.
How information is shared
- Your care team — providers you link can see your check-ins, recovery trends, and questions relevant to your care.
- Artificial-intelligence service providers — the third parties that generate answers, search embeddings, and transcriptions for us. What they receive and why is set out in the next section.
- Other service providers — vendors that host our infrastructure and database, deliver email, and provide analytics, under agreements that limit their use of your information to providing services to us.
- Legal — when required by law or to protect the rights, safety, or security of CareGuide, our users, or others.
Artificial-intelligence service providers
CareGuide answers questions with third-party AI models. To do that, we send certain data you provide to the following companies, which process it on our behalf:
- Anthropic, PBC (Claude models) — generates the answer to your question, the clarifying questions we may ask first, the clinical facts we note from your confirmations, and the responses in the informed-consent interview.
- OpenAI, L.L.C. — converts the text of your question into a numeric “embedding” that we use to search your provider’s protocols and published research.
- Amazon Web Services (Amazon Transcribe) — converts microphone recordings into text when you use dictation.
What is sent. The questions and messages you type, including any health details you include in them; earlier messages in the same conversation, so answers stay in context; the provider or body part you selected; and, when your provider has set them, your procedure, surgery date, days since surgery, your recent check-in scores (pain, confidence, sleep) and clinical facts you have confirmed in chat. In the informed-consent interview, your diagnosis, procedure, the name you enter, and your questions. When you dictate, the audio recording.
What is not sent. Your email address, password, account identifiers, wearable data, and recovery score are not sent to these providers.
How they may use it. Each provider processes this data only to return a result to CareGuide, under agreements that prohibit them from using it to train their models or for any purpose of their own.
Your permission. In the CareGuide mobile app, nothing is sent to these providers until you have read an in-app disclosure and explicitly allowed it; you can withdraw that permission at any time under Settings → AI data sharing, after which no new questions, dictation, or interview messages are sent. On the website, submitting a question is how you ask us to generate an answer with these providers.
Data retention and deletion
We keep your information while your account is active. You can delete your account at any time — in the mobile app under Settings → Delete account, or by contacting us. Deletion permanently removes your account and the data keyed to it, including conversations, check-ins, linked providers, and wearable connections.
Security
All traffic to the Service is encrypted in transit (HTTPS). Passwords are stored as salted bcrypt hashes, wearable tokens are encrypted at rest, and access to production systems is restricted. No system is perfectly secure, so please use a strong, unique password.
Children
The Service is not directed to children under 13, and we do not knowingly collect personal information from them. Recovering patients under 18 should use CareGuide with a parent or guardian.
Your choices
- Update your name, language, and linked providers in the app or portal.
- Allow or withdraw sharing with the AI providers above in the mobile app (Settings → AI data sharing).
- Disconnect wearables at any time.
- Use guest mode to ask questions without an account.
- Delete your account and data as described above.
Changes to this policy
We will post any changes here and update the date above. For material changes we will notify you in the Service.