A therapy record is the most sensitive thing a person will ever write down. PsyBird is built so that the promises below are structural — enforced by the database and by the boundary the data lives in, not by an application remembering to behave.
BAA-coveredSigned with every practice, and with our cloud provider.
US regions onlyPHI is stored and processed on HIPAA-eligible US infrastructure.
Encrypted throughoutIn transit and at rest, on every service that touches a record.
Never trains a modelNo patient data is used to train AI — not by us, not by our provider.
The question clinicians ask first
Your clinical notes are therapist-only by construction.
Session notes, your private notes on a patient, and the therapist context you write to steer Psy are not stored in the patient’s record at all. They live in a separate, therapist-owned document, and the database rules give the patient account no access to it — not write, not read, not even to their own.
That separation is what turns the promise into a property of the system. Because those fields never leave the therapist’s side, the patient’s device never receives them. And the patient-facing Psy prompt is assembled on the patient’s device, from the record that device holds. There is no code path by which a note could reach the prompt, because the note is not on the machine that builds it. A leak would take a deliberate change to the storage model, not a forgotten filter.
The same split protects the work in progress. A letter Psy drafts for your review sits only in the therapist-owned copy until you approve it — an unapproved draft is never written to the patient’s side of the record. Your Psy workspace, where you think out loud about a caseload and quote from it freely, is therapist-only too: no patient account can read those conversations.
Therapist-only — the patient can never read it
Session notes and the full private-note history
Therapist context and the calibration that steers Psy
Letters you haven’t approved yet
Your Psy workspace conversations
Session rates, time logs, and billing
What the patient sees
Their plan: exercises, meditations, goals
Their own chats with Psy, and their check-ins
Letters after you approve them
Direct messages between the two of you
Appointments and reminders
Their own data, exportable from Settings
Patients are told plainly, in the consent they sign, that their therapist can read their chats and check-ins. PsyBird is a window into the week between sessions — it is not a secret-keeper in either direction.
The full breakdown
HIPAA and the BAA boundary
Every therapist signs a BAA. It is part of onboarding, inside the Therapist Services Agreement — there is no separate negotiation and nothing to chase.
We operate under an executed BAA with Google Cloud. Protected health information is stored and processed exclusively on HIPAA-eligible services, in US regions.
One covered environment, not a chain of vendors. Database, authentication, serverless functions, file storage and the AI models all sit inside the same agreement, which means there are fewer places PHI can be at all.
Payments never touch health data. Stripe sees a practice’s billing details. It never sees a patient, a record, or a conversation.
Encryption, audit and recovery
Encrypted in transit and at rest. All traffic is encrypted in transit; data is encrypted at rest on every service that stores it.
Actions on patient data are audit-logged. At the application layer and at the cloud layer, independently. Security audit logs are retained for six years.
Point-in-time recovery plus daily backups. Backups are retained fourteen days on a rolling cycle, with a point-in-time recovery window behind them.
Monitored around the clock. Every AI endpoint carries alerting, so a failure surfaces as a page to us rather than as a confused patient.
Isolation and access
The database rules are the authorization boundary. Every row of clinical data is bound to a single practice by rules enforced server-side, on every read and every write. There is no application backdoor around them, because there is no path that does not go through them.
Isolation is tested on every release. The rule suite runs in CI: a therapist reaching for another practice’s data, or a patient reaching for another patient’s, has to fail before anything ships.
A patient can only ever reach their own record. A therapist, only their own practice. Clinic admins see only their own organization’s practices.
Revocation is instant. Removing a patient severs data access immediately and signs their sessions out everywhere, on every device.
Only genuine apps get in. App-integrity attestation means only authentic PsyBird apps and browsers can reach patient data; anything else is turned away before it reaches the database.
Calls, messages and notifications
Calls stay between you. Video and voice are peer-to-peer: call media flows directly between the two participants and never through our servers. Where a direct connection is impossible, a fallback relay carries only encrypted media it cannot read and does not store.
Recording is consented, and the consent is enforced server-side. Session recording for notes happens only with the patient consent recorded at intake, checked against the therapist-owned copy of that flag rather than anything a client could flip. The audio is destroyed immediately after transcription.
Notifications never carry patient information. Every email and push says what happened, never who or what was said. A lock screen or an inbox reveals nothing about anyone’s care.
No shared numbers. Patients and therapists communicate only through PsyBird. Personal phone numbers are never exchanged, and never stored for messaging.
Call setup is PHI-free by construction. The signaling record carries the connection details and nothing else — no name, no clinical content — and the rules enforce that shape.
How the AI is contained
All AI processing happens server-side, inside the boundary. The models run in the same covered environment that stores the data, under the same Business Associate Agreement.
Patient data is never used to train models. Not by us, and not by our cloud provider. Conversations are processed only to generate Psy’s reply.
Psy answers from one plan, not from a pooled memory. Each conversation is built from that single patient’s record. There is no cross-patient context, and no practice-wide model quietly learning from your caseload.
Voice runs on the same footing. Live voice is relayed through our own covered service to the same models, and the audio is not retained after the exchange.
Your data stays yours
Therapists own their clinical records. Export at any time, per patient or the whole practice, as CSV or complete JSON. Nothing is held hostage to a subscription.
Patients can download their own data. It is a button in Settings, and account deletion is available in-app to both roles.
Deleting a login is not deleting a chart. If a patient removes their account their login goes, and the clinical record stays with the practice that is obliged to retain it. Invite them back with a fresh key and they reconnect to the same chart.
Offboarding is bounded. When a practice stops using PsyBird, records are made available for export and our copies are deleted within thirty days, with backups purged on the rolling cycle. Operational logs are kept about twelve months, security audit logs six years, billing records seven years.
Found something? Tell us.
We would rather hear it from you than from anybody else. Report a suspected vulnerability to and we will confirm receipt, keep you updated while we fix it, and credit you if you want the credit. Please give us a reasonable window before disclosing publicly, and please don’t test against real patient data.
For BAA copies, security questionnaires, or anything else a compliance officer needs, the same address reaches a person.
This page describes how PsyBird is built and operated today. It is a summary written for clinicians, not a contract: the binding commitments live in the Terms of Service, the Business Associate Agreement, and the Privacy Policy. Washington residents should also read our Consumer Health Data Privacy Policy.
HIPAA-compliant infrastructureGrounded in clinical research