What we see, and where it goes.
Your receptionist books appointments. It does not read your patient records — and this page explains exactly what it does handle, where that information sits, and what your clinic can switch off.
What Flowlify actually sees
Your receptionist handles appointment logistics. That is the whole of its job, and the whole of what it collects on a call: the caller's name, a callback number, the pet's name, the reason for the visit, and the time slot they pick.
It has no read access to your practice management system. It cannot open, search, or retrieve a patient's medical record — not because it is told not to, but because it is not connected to the system those records live in. If a caller asks what was on their dog's chart last visit, it cannot answer. It takes the question down and your team calls back.
So the honest scope of what leaves your front desk is a booking: a name, a number, a pet, a reason, a time. Not a clinical history.
Where your data lives
Booking details — client name, phone number, pet, appointment — are stored in Flowlify's own database, on infrastructure we control. They are not left sitting with the companies that handle the voice.
Call recordings are kept for 30 days and then deleted automatically. If your clinic would rather we never record at all, that can be switched off for your organisation, and then no audio file is created in the first place.
Transcripts are kept, because the written summary you read after each call is made from them. Recording and transcripts are separate settings, which is worth knowing: turn recording off and no audio file is ever created, but the transcript and the summary are still produced. Your team keeps a written record of what was said on every call, and no voice recording of your client exists anywhere.
Turning speech into text, working out what to say, and speaking it back are done by vetted third-party providers. Which providers we use changes as better ones appear, so we do not print a list here that would be out of date within a month — ask us and we will tell you exactly who is in the path today.
We do not sell any of it, and we do not use it to train generalised AI models.
Owning it and hosting it are different things
Elsewhere on this site we say your data stays yours, and it does — you own the recordings, transcripts and client details, we will not sell them, and we will delete them when you ask. That is a promise about ownership. It is not a claim that nothing is ever processed outside your building. In the standard setup, calls are processed and stored on our infrastructure and pass through those third-party providers. If you need the data to stay inside your own systems as well as belong to you, that is the self-hosted option below.
Your controls
These are your clinic's choices, not ours. Tell us what you want and we set it that way.
| Control | What it means |
|---|---|
| Call recording | On or off, set for your whole organisation. With it off, no audio file is ever created — there is nothing to store and nothing to delete. Transcripts and call summaries are unaffected, so you keep the written record either way. |
| Recording retention | Recordings are kept for 30 days and then deleted automatically. That happens on its own; nobody has to remember to do it. |
| Where the voice gateway runs | On our infrastructure by default. Or inside your own, with your own provider keys — see below. |
Running it inside your own infrastructure
The voice gateway Flowlify runs on is open source, under the MIT licence. A clinic that wants to can run it on its own infrastructure, using its own keys with the speech and language providers.
Set up that way, call audio never travels through our voice vendor's servers, and your practice holds the data-processing agreement with those providers directly — your relationship, your contract, your keys. It is more to run, so it is not the default, but it is there if your policy needs it.
About HIPAA
Practice managers ask about HIPAA constantly, and the honest answer is that it does not apply to veterinary records. That is not us sidestepping the question — it is worth knowing, because it changes what you should actually be asking a vendor for.
HIPAA governs protected health information about people, held by covered entities such as human healthcare providers and the business associates who work for them. Veterinary medical records are not protected health information under it. What governs your records is your state's veterinary practice act, along with general privacy and consumer-protection law.
Which means there is no HIPAA status for a veterinary phone system to hold. If a vendor offers you a HIPAA-compliant veterinary receptionist, they are selling you a badge with nothing behind it.
We would rather give you the controls than the sticker: a scope limited to bookings, recording you can turn off, recordings that delete themselves after 30 days, deletion whenever you ask, and the option to run the whole thing on your own infrastructure. We do not display certifications we have not earned — no SOC 2, no ISO 27001, no HIPAA. The day we hold one, it will say so here and not before.
Deleting your data
Ask, and we delete it. Email us and tell us what you want removed — a single call, a client, or everything we hold for your clinic — and we will do it and confirm when it is done.
Recordings age out after 30 days whether you ask or not. Deletion on request is for everything else, and it applies after you stop working with us too.
Still have a question we have not answered?
Ask it directly. If the answer is no, or not yet, we would rather tell you that now than after you have signed.