At PMHScribe, we know that privacy, confidentiality, and trust are the foundation of mental healthcare. As a transcription and documentation tool built specifically for psychiatrists, therapists, and mental health professionals, our platform is designed to protect sensitive health information while streamlining your documentation workflow.
If you’re evaluating digital tools for your practice and wondering how PMHScribe handles security and compliance, this blog post breaks it all down.
📜 Built for HIPAA Compliance
PMHScribe is designed to support full compliance with the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA). As a Business Associate to mental health providers, we follow all applicable Privacy and Security Rule requirements to protect Protected Health Information (PHI).
We support compliance by:
- Offering a Business Associate Agreement (BAA) to all Covered Entities and Business Associates who use PMHScribe.
- Maintaining signed BAAs with every subcontractor or vendor that handles PHI on our behalf.
Our infrastructure, workflows, and internal policies are all structured around HIPAA best practices — so you can trust that we treat patient data with the highest level of care.
☁️ Hosted in a HIPAA-Eligible Cloud Environment (AWS)
Your data is hosted within Amazon Web Services (AWS) — one of the most secure and trusted cloud providers in healthcare. We use HIPAA-eligible AWS services to ensure every layer of your PHI is encrypted, protected, and redundant.
AWS provides:
- Encryption in Transit and at Rest
- TLS 1.2+ for data in motion
- AES-256 for data at rest
- Multi-region high availability
- Redundant backups
- Certifications that include SOC 2, ISO 27001, HITRUST, and FedRAMP
With AWS as our foundation, your data benefits from the same security infrastructure used by leading hospitals and health systems.
🎙️ Secure, Real-Time Speech-to-Text Processing
PMHScribe uses an enterprise-grade, HIPAA-compliant speech-to-text engine to generate clinical transcriptions. While we don’t name the provider publicly for proprietary reasons, rest assured:
- Audio is processed in real time only
- Audio and transcript data are never stored or retained by the processor
- Data is encrypted in transit and handled entirely within HIPAA-eligible cloud regions
- A BAA is in place to ensure complete legal protection
This allows us to offer fast, accurate transcription without sacrificing compliance or privacy.
🔐 Key Security Features for Mental Health Providers
We’ve implemented modern security protections that meet — and often exceed — industry standards for digital health software. Highlights include:
- Strong password enforcement for user accounts
- Automatic logout after inactivity to prevent unauthorized access
- Role-based access control, limiting PHI access to only authorized users
- Audit logs to track data access and changes
- Continuous monitoring and vulnerability scanning
- Internal access controls with strict audit trails
All PMHScribe team members complete HIPAA training and access PHI only when necessary for technical support — with full logging and permissions.
📁 Data Retention and Ownership
When you use PMHScribe to document care, your notes and transcripts are securely stored as long as you maintain an active subscription or a storage-only plan. As a customer:
- You maintain full ownership of your clinical data
- You can export your own records at any time
- We do not delete or destroy records unless you request it
- PMHScribe supports long-term documentation needs for practices of all sizes
While PMHScribe is not a certified EHR platform, it offers the structure and security necessary for EMR-style recordkeeping. Our system is fully capable of supporting mental health providers who wish to maintain documentation digitally — with the flexibility and simplicity they need.
However, it is the responsibility of each healthcare provider to comply with applicable state record retention laws and professional licensing requirements regarding how long records must be maintained.
🚨 Breach Response Plan
PMHScribe maintains a HIPAA-compliant incident response plan to handle any data security event swiftly and responsibly. In the event of a breach involving PHI:
- Affected customers will be notified as required by HIPAA
- Incidents are investigated, documented, and resolved quickly
- Our technical and compliance teams oversee mitigation and prevention
We regularly review and update our policies to keep pace with evolving threats and regulations.
✅ Final Thoughts
PMHScribe was built from the ground up for mental health professionals who care deeply about protecting their patients’ privacy. From secure transcription to encrypted storage, role-based access, and compliant hosting — we give you the confidence to focus on clinical care, not technical risk.
Thank you for trusting PMHScribe.
