Privacy policy

When a home-care agency keeps client records in CareKindle, the agency is the health information custodian (PHIPA’s term in Ontario) or the responsible organization under the comparable laws of other provinces. CareKindle acts as the agency’s service provider: we process personal health information only on the agency’s instructions and only to provide the service the agency signed up for.

We do not sell personal information, and we do not use client health records for advertising. The records an agency keeps in CareKindle belong to that agency and its clients, not to us.

For the information we collect directly (the account details of agency staff who sign up, subscription billing records, and the messages you send us), CareKindle is responsible in its own right.

• Client records: profiles, intake details, care plans, assessments, visit notes and documents.
• Visit-verification records: GPS check-in and check-out times and locations for scheduled visits.
• Caregiver employment records: credentials and expiry dates, availability, and timesheets built from verified visits.
• Client billing records: invoices with GST/HST, recorded payments (including Interac e-Transfer), and insurer claims.
• Family-portal activity: which authorized family members viewed the records shared with them.
• Messages between office staff and caregivers.

We process these records to run the features the agency uses, nothing else.

• Account information: name, email address, role and sign-in records for agency staff and caregivers who hold CareKindle accounts.
• Subscription and billing details for the agency’s CareKindle subscription, processed by Stripe. CareKindle never charges an agency’s clients or their families.
• Support correspondence: whatever you send to hello@carekindle.com.
• Cookies: one to keep you signed in, and one that remembers your language preference (English or French). We do not use advertising or cross-site tracking cookies.
• Optional analytics, only if you say yes: our public website asks before setting a Google Analytics cookie that helps us understand which pages are useful. Decline and nothing is set — the site works identically. Your choice is remembered for 180 days and you can clear it anytime by deleting the ck-consent cookie.
• Campaign context: when you arrive from a link that carries campaign tags (like utm_source), we keep those tags, the referring site’s domain, and the first page you landed on in a first-party cookie for 90 days, so that if you later contact us or sign up we know which channel brought you. It contains no name, no email, and no browsing history.

The safeguards below are in place today and described in full on our security page:

• Every agency’s data is isolated at the database layer, so one agency can never reach another’s.
• Sensitive actions are written to an append-only, immutable audit log.
• Chart views are logged, showing who looked at which record, and when.
• Passwords are hashed and salted, and never stored in plain text.
• Personal health information is redacted from our application logs.
• Role-based access control: six operator roles, with separate caregiver and family realms.
• All traffic is encrypted in transit (TLS).

We also publish what we have not yet earned or verified. Our certification roadmap lives on the same page.

Read the full security page

A small number of third parties help us run CareKindle. We publish the full register (who they are, what they do, and where they process data) on our security page, and we keep it current. Where a region is not yet confirmed for our live deployment, the register says “Confirming region” rather than guessing.

Today the register includes our cloud hosting and database provider, Stripe (agency subscription billing only) and Mapbox (maps and geocoding for scheduling and visit verification). QuickBooks Online is listed as coming soon. Today’s accounting hand-off is a CSV export, which means your accounting data goes where you take it.

See the sub-processor register

If you receive care from an agency that uses CareKindle, your record belongs to your care relationship with that agency. The agency is the custodian, and requests to see, correct or delete your information go to them. That is not us passing the buck: it is how Canadian health-privacy law assigns responsibility, and it puts the decision with the people who know your care.

CareKindle gives agencies the tooling to handle those requests: a compliance centre that records privacy requests, consents, incidents and retention settings, plus a log of every chart view. If your request reaches us directly, we will refer it to your agency and tell you we did.

If you hold a CareKindle account (agency staff or caregiver), write to hello@carekindle.com about your account information and we will handle it ourselves.

Retention of client records is directed by the agency, which carries the record-keeping obligations of a custodian under provincial law. CareKindle provides retention settings the agency administers from its compliance centre.

We keep our own records (accounts, subscription and billing history, support correspondence) for as long as we need them to run the service and meet our legal and accounting obligations.

When this policy changes, the date at the top changes with it. For material changes we will notify agency account owners. Every revision is dated, and nothing gets rewritten quietly.