Privacy policy

Who we are

DermDesk is a South African teledermatology clinical decision support service that connects healthcare practitioners with a registered dermatologist. This policy explains what personal information we process, why, and how we protect it.

What we collect about practitioners

• Account details: name, email address, phone number, HPCSA number, practice details.
• Billing records: payment references and amounts (card and bank details are processed by Payfast and never stored by us).
• Usage records: an audit log of actions taken on the platform, kept for accountability.

What we collect about patients — and what we deliberately don't

We never collect patient names, identity numbers, or contact details. A case contains only: the practice's own internal file reference, the patient's age and sex, clinical notes, and clinical photographs. Only the submitting practice can connect a case to a patient, through its own records. The submitting practitioner confirms patient consent for every case, and the consent wording is stored with the case.

Where data lives

All patient data is stored and processed in South Africa: our application runs in Cape Town, and case records and photographs are stored encrypted in data centres in the Cape Town region. One exception applies: photographs and clinical notes are transiently processed by our AI analysis provider (Anthropic, United States) under a data processing agreement that prohibits training on the data and retention beyond processing. The AI output is used only to assist the reviewing dermatologist. The dermatologist may also choose to have the AI reword her own response text; she reviews and approves every word before it is sent, and the clinical content is hers.

If the dermatologist dictates a response, the audio is transcribed by her device's speech-recognition service (Google on Android, Apple on iPhone) and is not stored by us or by them beyond transcription. Dictation never includes patient names or identifiers, because the service holds none.

Who we share data with

• The reviewing dermatologist (clinical purpose of the service).
• Service providers under data processing agreements: AWS (hosting), Anthropic (transient AI analysis), Payfast (payments), GamCo (email hosting — never clinical content), Sentry and PostHog (error and product analytics, scrubbed of personal information), Vercel (application hosting), Upstash (rate limiting), and the device speech-recognition service (Google / Apple) only when the dermatologist dictates.
• No data is ever sold or used for advertising.

Retention

• Clinical photographs: deleted after 12 months.
• Case records: retained as part of the clinical record, then deleted after 5 years.
• Audit logs: 7 years.

Your rights

Practitioners may access, correct, or export their information (practices can export their full case history from the dashboard), and may lodge a complaint with the Information Regulator (South Africa). Requests: hello@dermdesk.co.za.

Security

Encryption in transit and at rest, individual logins with mandatory multi-factor authentication for the reviewing dermatologist, practice-scoped access controls, signed time-limited image URLs, and an append-only audit log.

See also our POPIA notice and Terms of service.