Hea

Privacy

In short

Who we are

Hea Europe Ltd, a company registered in England and Wales, company number 15400266, registered office Snowdrop Court, 21 Royal Engineers Way, London NW7 1TU. Email: hello@tryhea.com.

We decide how your information is used (the controller under UK GDPR).

What we collect

Your first name and email, to sign you in and to show the account is yours. When you sign in with a code, the code stops working after 10 minutes and is kept only as a scrambled value (a hash).

If you tick that you would like to help test Hea: that choice, and the WhatsApp number if you give one, so we can ask you for feedback by email or WhatsApp. You can stop in your account at any time, and the number is deleted with it.

A check-up: the answers you give in your assistant, including the full text of what you write, and your plan. If you ask for them on the plan card: the date of your next check-up with your request for an email reminder, and your request to be told when tests can be booked through Hea (dates and your choice only, no health details). We do not collect payment details during the beta.

What Hea remembers: Hea asks about the same things in a check-up, on the card of your lab results and in the symptom questions. An answer you pressed or saw on a Hea card in one of them is shown in the others, ticked, for you to check, with where and when you gave it; the newest answer stands. An answer your assistant passed on without a card is used where it was given and is not carried anywhere else. Never carried: answers about another adult or a child, and the answers to the urgent-sign and safety questions, which are asked again every time (one exception: a new check-up does not ask a man again whether he is pregnant). When you open a check-up, your lab results, the symptom questions or the skin diary, Hea also gives your assistant a few lines, so that it does not ask you again: your sex and age; the conditions, medicines and allergies you named, each with its date; what is old enough to check again (for example your weight, smoking and alcohol); what you left unfinished; and how many results and notes Hea keeps for you. What you ticked about family background, pregnancy and periods, contraception, hormones, medicines for mental health and opioids is never in those lines; a medicine you named in your own words is, as you wrote it. When you start the symptom questions for another adult, nothing about you is in them. With lab results Hea cannot know whose they are until you say so on the card, so the lines are given with a note that they are about you only. All of it goes when you delete the check-up, the results or the note it came from.

The card of what Hea knows about you: ask your assistant what Hea knows about you, and Hea shows every line it remembers, with where and when it came from. There you confirm or take out any line, correct what you said in your own words, and add your GP and your medicines, allergies and conditions in your own words. Your assistant may suggest what to add from your conversation; nothing is kept until you press Save on the card. When the card opens, your assistant is given its lines, your GP included, except the kinds Hea leaves out of the summary it gives your assistant (such as ancestry, pregnancy and periods, contraception, hormones, and antipsychotic medicines or opioids ticked on a card), and it is not told whether there are any: those are shown to you on that card only. What you add there is kept until you take it out there or delete your account; while a newer answer of yours (in a symptom note) is kept, Hea shows that one instead. What you press on a line of a check-up, your results or a note is tied to that check-up, those results or that note (when you take a line out or correct it: to each of them that has the same answer), and goes when they are deleted, or when a note turns out to be about someone else (what you wrote yourself stays); until then a line you took out is not used, while the check-up, results or note itself keeps what you answered there.

Lab results, if you share a report with your assistant: it reads it in your chat and sends us only the test name, value, unit, sample date and lab name of each line, and the flag and reference range the laboratory itself printed; we keep the ones you save with the Save button. We never receive or keep the file itself, and the assistant is told not to pass on names, dates of birth, addresses or NHS numbers. On the card you say whose results they are, check what Hea already has about you from a check-up, an earlier report or a symptom note of your own (what you pressed or saw on a card there), and tick or type what a GP needs to know to read these tests: your age, sex, height and weight, habits such as smoking, alcohol and diet, periods, long-term conditions and medicines, whether a close relative had early heart disease, type 2 diabetes or prostate cancer, why the test was done, how the blood was taken and what happened before the sample (for example a recent infection, or biotin in a supplement). What you have already told your assistant in the chat about this (your age, sex, height and weight; symptoms, conditions and medicines in your own words) it passes on, so the card does not ask twice. All of it is kept with the report once you press Save, shown to you next time to check (the symptom questions offer the age and sex you confirmed there), and handed to your assistant together with the results; it goes when you delete the results. Results of someone you help are shown and not kept. We use the results to show what the laboratory marked, to prepare questions for your GP, to mark tests as done or missing in your plan and to warn you about a result in the range where labs phone a doctor the same day. We do not grade or interpret them.

Photos of moles, if you use the skin diary: the photo goes from your phone or computer straight to Hea, not through the chat, and the assistant never sees it. We keep the photo, its date, the body zone you chose, your own note and what your device measured about sharpness and light. Where the photo was taken (the EXIF data in the file) is removed before it is stored, and each person's photos are encrypted with a key of their own. Hea does not look at your photos and says nothing about a mole: it keeps them, dates them and shows them side by side. If you go through the NICE checklist about a mole, your answers, the score and what you did next are kept with that mole.

A symptom, if you tell Hea about one: your answers to the urgent-sign questions, the age and sex you confirm, what you wrote about the problem when you began, what the assistant picked out of your own words and you saved, the full text of your story, and the note for your GP made from them. We use them to show where the NHS says to go when an urgent sign applies and to put your answers in order for your GP. What you answered there about yourself, not about the symptom (your age and sex, smoking, alcohol, diet, periods, long-term conditions, the medicines you named and your allergies), Hea remembers for you: the card of your lab results shows it next time, for you to check, and a later symptom note shows what Hea remembers (your age and sex, conditions, smoking, medicines and allergies) to confirm with one press instead of asking again. Only what you pressed yourself, or saw on a Hea card and saved, is remembered this way: not what your assistant recorded for you without a card, also after you confirm the note. The answers to the urgent-sign questions never are, and nothing from a note about another adult or a child. It goes when you delete the note (what you then confirmed on a results card stays with that report). The page to print the note opens only by a link that lasts 30 minutes.

The reading of your symptom: after you confirm the note and ask for it, Hea hands your assistant everything it has collected about the problem, so that the assistant can say what it may be and what to do, for your GP to confirm. That is: the note and your story as you wrote it; which urgent signs you were asked and what you answered; what Hea remembers about you from a check-up, your lab results and earlier notes, each with its date (here also what the short lines above never show: pregnancy and periods, contraception, hormones, medicines for mental health and opioids; never your family background); your saved lab results of the last 12 months, as the laboratory printed them; the dates of earlier notes about the same problem; the sentences of the US product labels of your medicines that mention the symptom; a guideline's criteria compared with your answers; and published studies about the problem. The card shows you the same list under "What the reading rests on". For a note about another adult, nothing about you is handed over. The assistant's reading is its own, written in your chat; Hea checks that each sentence names what it rests on and shows it on the card, and does not keep it.

To find the studies, Hea sends PubMed (the US National Library of Medicine) and Europe PMC (EMBL-EBI) only general medical words: the problem, your age group, how long it has lasted and, when you confirmed one, a condition, a habit or a kind of medicine from Hea's own list (for example "diabetes", "smoking", "ACE inhibitors"). To read a product label, Hea sends openFDA (the US Food and Drug Administration) only the name of a medicine from Hea's own list that your words name (for example "ramipril"). Never your name, contact details, your own words, a dose or anything else you answered, and nothing that says who is asking. For a general health question, Hea sends PubMed and Europe PMC only the topic in general English words, and keeps nothing.

Technical records: when you signed up, signed in and connected an assistant, which steps you completed, and where a visit to our home page came from (the website that sent it and the campaign tags of its link). Some of these are sent to our analytics service as events (see below), never with health information.

Why, and on what basis

To build and show your plans and notes, to check that your answers were understood correctly, and to improve the questions. Health information is special category data: we process it only with your explicit consent (UK GDPR Article 9(2)(a)), which you give with the tick when you sign up. Family background is asked only if you allow it separately, in your account. We contact you for feedback only if you ticked that you would like to help test Hea (your consent). Your name and email are used to run your account (the service you asked for). Reminders and news about booking tests are sent only if you ask for them; you can turn them off in your account or from any of those emails. The analytics events help us see where people come from and where they get stuck (our legitimate interest); they carry no health information.

Who else handles it

How long

What you share stays until you delete it, or your whole account, on your account page or by asking us. It is not deleted when the beta ends. If we close Hea, we tell you first and then delete it. Old sign-in codes are cleared out after two days, the next time anyone signs in. A browser stays signed in for 90 days after your last visit.

Backups: Railway backs the database up, and an encrypted copy is kept on a computer of the Hea team in the UK; they are used only to restore Hea after a failure. A backup keeps what was in the database on the day it was made, so what you delete stays in older backups until they are removed in turn, and at the latest until the beta ends, when they are deleted.

Your rights

You can see, correct or delete your data at any time, withdraw your consent (which stops any further processing), and object to the analytics. Your account has “Delete my data”, “Delete results”, “Delete the diary” and “Delete the notes”, and shows which assistants are connected; you can open it from any browser with a code we email you. You can also ask your assistant to delete a check-up, your saved results or a symptom note. If you are unhappy with how we handle your data, you can complain to the Information Commissioner's Office (ico.org.uk).

Clinicians and clinics on the waitlist

When a specialist, psychiatrist, therapist, pharmacist or clinic joins the waitlist on mcp.tryhea.com/clinicians, we keep what the form asks: role, name, work email, specialty, registration number if given, the organisation, its website and CQC provider ID for a clinic, how they would like to work and what they wrote. We use it only to contact them about joining Hea's founding cohort (our legitimate interest, and their consent on the form). It is kept apart from the people who use Hea and from any health data, on our servers in the EU, until we decide how the cohort will work, or until they ask us to delete it, whichever comes first. Resend sends them a confirmation email and sends us their details. Mixpanel receives only the role and the specialty, never a name, an email or a number. They can see, correct or delete their details by writing to us; the rights and the right to complain to the ICO above apply too.

Contact

Hea Europe Ltd, a company registered in England and Wales, company number 15400266, registered office Snowdrop Court, 21 Royal Engineers Way, London NW7 1TU. Email: hello@tryhea.com.

The rules for using Hea are in the terms of use.