Trust, privacy and the record · 1 of 4
What happens to a recording
Where the audio goes, who decides how long it stays, and the thing worth understanding before you set a retention window.
A recording of a dental visit is protected health information, and it is the most sensitive thing Mesio holds. Here is what happens to it.
Where it goes
Audio uploads from the browser into storage Mesio operates on its own cloud infrastructure. Turning that audio into text also happens on Mesio's own infrastructure rather than being handed to a general-purpose transcription service.
That second point is a deliberate cost. Running speech recognition yourself is more work than calling someone else's, and it is the difference between a recording of your patient staying inside a boundary you control and being handed to a vendor for convenience.
Who decides how long it is kept
You do. Not Mesio.
Under your agreement, the practice is the covered entity and owns the record. Mesio holds it on your behalf. So Mesio does not unilaterally decide when your clinical data expires, and it does not quietly delete a record you may be legally required to keep.
You set a retention window, per practice or for an individual patient. A nightly process enforces whatever you set. A patient under legal hold is exempt and is never purged, whatever the window says.
Read this before you set a window. Retention governs the patient's record for that period, not only the recording. When a window expires it removes the audio and also archives clinical notes older than that window. Dental records usually have to be retained for years, so a short window is not the same as a short audio-retention policy. Pick the number you would defend for the whole record, and talk to us if what you actually want is a shorter life for audio specifically.
What expiry actually removes
When a window is reached, the recording is deleted from storage, the transcript text is cleared, clinical notes past the window are archived, and personal details Mesio had noted about the patient are removed. Every one of those steps is written to the audit log, recording what was done and to which record, with no clinical content in the entry itself.
Diagnostic perio audio has a short protected floor, because it is the end-of-day review record a hygienist listens back to site by site.
If you set nothing
Nothing expires. That is the safe default for a medical record and the wrong default for a recording, which is why it is worth deciding rather than leaving.
Read the warning above first — the window governs the record, not just the audio.