Who is responsible for what
There are two different relationships on this page, and the difference matters.
If you are a patient of a clinic that uses Sada
Your clinic decides what is recorded about you and why. In data-protection language, the clinic is the controller and Sada is the processor: we hold and process the records on the clinic's instructions, and we do not decide what goes into your file. If you want to see, correct or delete your record, ask your clinic first — they can act immediately, and they are the ones who hold the relationship with you. If you cannot reach them, write to us and we will help them respond.
If you are a clinic using Sada
You are the controller of your patients' data. We are your processor, and the terms of that are set out in our Data Processing Addendum, which forms part of your agreement with us. You are responsible for having a lawful basis to hold patient records and to message patients on WhatsApp.
If you are just visiting this website
We are the controller for the little we collect here, which is described under Cookies.
What we hold
We hold what a clinic puts into Sada, plus what patients send to the clinic's WhatsApp number.
Clinic staff accounts
- Name, email address, role, and a hashed password (we never store the password itself).
- A session cookie when signed in, and a log of key actions taken in the system.
Patient records, as entered by the clinic
- Identity and contact: name, phone number, email, date of birth, gender, address, and the clinic's own file number.
- Clinical: medical alerts, allergies and conditions, notes, tooth charting, treatments and treatment plans, prescriptions.
- Files the clinic or patient uploads, such as X-rays, panoramics, scans and documents.
- Financial: invoices, payments, balances, and any wallet credit held for the patient.
- Appointments, including which branch and which dentist.
WhatsApp conversations
- The messages exchanged between the patient and the clinic's WhatsApp number, with timestamps.
- The patient's WhatsApp phone number and the profile name WhatsApp provides.
- Images and documents sent in the chat, and voice notes — see below for how those are handled.
Technical
Ordinary server logs (IP address, browser type, time of request, errors) for security and debugging.
We do not run advertising or tracking on this website, we do not sell data, and we do not use patient data to market anything to patients.
What we do with it
- Run the clinic software — records, calendar, charting, billing, inventory, reporting.
- Send the messages the clinic asks for — appointment reminders, follow-ups, recalls and, where the clinic has enabled it, replies from the AI receptionist.
- Support — when clinic staff ask for help, our team may need to look at the affected records to diagnose the problem.
- Security and integrity — audit entries, backups, and investigating misuse.
- Billing — invoicing clinics for their subscription.
We do not use the contents of patient records or conversations to build profiles, to advertise, or to train our own models.
AI, voice notes and WhatsApp
The AI receptionist
When a clinic enables the AI receptionist, the messages a patient sends — and the context needed to answer them, such as the patient's upcoming appointments and the clinic's services and opening hours — are sent to Anthropic to generate a reply. Anthropic processes this on our behalf as an API customer, and this data is not used to train their models. Clinics can switch the AI off entirely and still receive reminders; in that mode patient messages are recorded for the clinic's inbox and answered by a human.
Voice notes
If a patient sends a voice note, the audio is sent to transcription providers (Speechmatics and Deepgram) to convert it to text so the assistant can read it. Only the audio needed for that transcription is sent.
Messages travel over the WhatsApp Business Platform, which is operated by Meta. Meta processes them under its own terms and privacy policy, and we cannot control or delete data held by Meta. Reminders sent outside WhatsApp's 24-hour service window use message templates that Meta reviews and approves in advance.
What the assistant will not do
The assistant is a receptionist, not a clinician. It is built to refuse clinical questions — dosage, whether to take a medication, whether a symptom is serious — and hand them to the clinic's team instead.
Companies that process data for us
We keep this list short on purpose. Each of these is bound to process data only on our instructions.
| Provider | What it does for Sada | What it can see |
|---|---|---|
| Railway | Hosting for the application and its databases | All stored clinic and patient data |
| Cloudflare (R2) | Storage for uploaded files and off-site backups | Uploaded files and database backups |
| Anthropic | Generates the AI receptionist's replies | Conversation messages and the appointment/service context sent with them |
| Meta (WhatsApp Business Platform) | Delivers WhatsApp messages | Message content, phone numbers, delivery status |
| Speechmatics · Deepgram | Transcribe patient voice notes | The voice note audio only |
| Vercel | Hosts this marketing website | Website request logs only — no clinic data |
| Zoho Mail | Our business email | Whatever you choose to write to us |
If we add or replace a provider that handles clinic data, we will update this list; clinics on a Data Processing Addendum are notified in advance as set out there.
Where the data lives
Sada's servers are in the United States (our hosting provider's US region), and backups are held in Cloudflare's object storage. Our AI and transcription providers process data on their own infrastructure, which may be in the United States or elsewhere.
This means personal data of patients in Lebanon and elsewhere is transferred outside their country to be processed. By using Sada, a clinic instructs us to process its data in this way. If you need data to remain in a specific country, tell us before you sign up — we cannot promise it on the cloud product today.
How long we keep it
- While you are a customer: clinic and patient records are kept for as long as the clinic's account is active, because a dental record is a long-lived document the clinic is usually required to retain.
- Backups: off-site backups are kept on a rolling 30-day window and then deleted automatically. Data you delete from Sada can therefore persist in backups for up to 30 days.
- After termination: we delete a clinic's data on request, and in any case within 90 days of the account closing, except where we must keep something to comply with the law (for example, our own accounting records of what you paid us).
- Server logs: kept short-term for security and troubleshooting.
How it is protected
We would rather describe this accurately than impressively.
- In transit: all traffic to Sada is encrypted with HTTPS/TLS.
- Passwords: stored as salted scrypt hashes, never in readable form.
- Separation between clinics: every record belongs to exactly one clinic, and that boundary is enforced centrally in code rather than left to individual queries. We test it with automated checks that attempt cross-clinic access and must fail.
- Access control: staff accounts have roles, so a receptionist and a dentist see different things; sensitive sections can be restricted per role.
- Audit trail: key actions — bookings, money, record changes, administrative actions — are recorded with who did them.
- Backups: taken automatically and stored off-site, separate from the live system.
- Our access: a small number of Sada staff can access clinic data when providing support or fixing faults. We keep that group as small as the work allows.
No system is perfectly secure. If a breach affects your data, we will tell affected clinics without undue delay and describe what happened, what we know, and what we are doing about it.
Your rights, and how to use them
Depending on where you live, you may have rights to access your data, correct it, have it deleted, restrict or object to certain processing, and receive a copy in a portable form. Lebanon's Law No. 81/2018 on electronic transactions and personal data provides protections for people in Lebanon, and clinics or patients in the EU/UK may have rights under the GDPR.
Patients: contact your clinic — they hold your record and can act on it directly. Clinics: write to hello@sadaclinic.com and we will help, including producing a copy of your clinic's data.
Being straight with you: there is no self-service "export everything" button in the product today. Export requests are handled by our team, normally within 30 days, and we are working on making this self-service.
Deleting your data
To request deletion, email hello@sadaclinic.com from the address associated with your account, or write to the clinic that holds your record.
- A patient record is deleted or anonymised by the clinic's request, subject to any record-keeping the clinic is legally required to do.
- A whole clinic account is purged on request: records, files, conversations and appointments.
- WhatsApp conversations held by Sada are deleted with the account. Copies held by Meta, or on the patient's or clinic's phones, are outside our control.
- Deleted data disappears from backups as the 30-day backup window rolls over.
We confirm in writing when a deletion request is complete.
Changes and contact
If we change this policy in a way that materially affects clinics or their patients, we will notify clinic administrators by email or in the application before it takes effect. The date at the top always reflects the current version.
Sada is operated by Digital Echoes, Lebanon.
Privacy questions, access requests and deletion requests: hello@sadaclinic.com
See also: Terms of Service · Data Processing Addendum