Playbook, healthtech app
The questions a governance officer asks before a care provider adopts anything
In health, the review comes before the interest. An information governance officer, sometimes with a clinical safety colleague, works through the assessment their organisation requires before anybody is allowed to trial anything, and the questions barely change from one provider to the next. They are asking about special category data, lawful bases, where processing happens and what happens to a record afterwards, and the answers are documents you have already written for somebody else.
Why this is not the general answer
The handling pattern for security questionnaires holds across every trade. What follows is the part that does not.
- The reviewer sits inside a care organisation and is accountable for its own governance obligations rather than for a purchasing decision.
- The subject matter is special category health data, lawful bases, data flows, retention duties and clinical risk, not commercial security controls.
- The documents already exist because they were written for a regulator or an internal governance file, and they are almost never published anywhere a reviewer can find them.
- The identical review recurs at every organisation with near identical wording, which makes this the most repeatable high value volume on the entire site.
How it arrives
- do you have a data protection impact assessment we can review
- what is your lawful basis for processing health data
- where is patient data processed and by which organisations
- how long is clinical data retained and under what schedule
- do you maintain a clinical risk management file
- can we see your record of processing activities
What has to be indexed for this to work
| The data protection impact assessment and the data flow description | What data moves where, between which parties, and for what purpose. Reviewers start here and everything else in the assessment hangs off it. A clear diagram described in words is worth more than the whole rest of the pack. |
|---|---|
| The retention schedule for health related records | How long each category is kept, on what basis, and what happens at the end of it. Governance officers ask this early because their own organisation's duties depend on the answer, and a vague reply stops the review outright. |
| The subprocessor list with processing locations | Which organisations touch the data and in which countries. Location carries more weight in this setting than in most, and an undated list reads as one nobody keeps current. |
| Your clinical safety and standard assessment material | Whatever your market expects a supplier to produce, together with your scope statement about what the product does and does not claim. Every governance answer inherits its boundaries from that scope statement, so it needs to be indexed alongside the rest. |
The reply
The data flow description sets out each processing step and names the countries involved, and the subprocessor list on the trust page carries the same locations with the purpose of each. Retention for health related records follows the published schedule, which states the period for each category and the basis for it. The full assessment pack, including the impact assessment and the clinical safety documentation, is sent on request rather than published, so leave your name, your work email and the organisation you are reviewing on behalf of and it will come to you as a set.
It answers from the governance documents themselves with references back, which lets a reviewer check a claim against the source rather than accept a chat message into a governance file. It handles the pack the way health organisations expect, sent as a set to a named person, because a partial answer creates a second review cycle. It states no approval, certification or safety position that the documents do not, since those are exactly the claims a reviewer will verify.
Where it stops
The trigger. A request for the assessment pack, a signature, a completed template, or any answer that the organisation will file as a governance record.
The full pack and anything that needs completing or signing comes from the team rather than from here, and I cannot attest to an answer on a governance form. Leave your name, your work email and the organisation you are assessing for, and they will send the assessment set and pick up anything specific to your review.
It stops answering before it guesses, says who will pick it up, and asks for the one thing that makes a reply possible. Nothing about it reads as a dead end.
Never say this here
Out of bounds
- A lawful basis, certification or assessment status that is not written in your own documents.
- That the product is approved, accredited or endorsed by a named body.
- Any characterisation of clinical risk, safety or suitability for a care setting.
- That a wording change to a governance answer or an assessment response is acceptable.
Questions
- Our governance pack is confidential. Can it still help?
- Yes, by answering the layer above it. Data flows, processing locations, retention periods and the scope statement can be published or summarised for reviewers, and the pack itself is routed as a request. That combination unblocks most of a review without publishing anything you have not chosen to.
- Reviewers want our answers inside their own template. Can it fill that in?
- No. It answers in chat with references to the source document, which is what lets an officer verify each claim. Completing an assessment is an attestation from a named person, and a widget cannot make one.
- Is there a risk it says something about clinical safety it should not?
- The mitigation is the scope statement. Every answer inherits the claims in the material it reads, so if what you index describes the product as your regulatory and clinical people worded it, that is what comes back. Index looser marketing wording and it will repeat that instead, in writing, to a governance officer.
Keep reading
- Everything for a healthtech appHealth data is a special category and clinical claims carry device rules. What a healthtech assistant answers for patients, and for buyers.
- Handling security questionnaires in generalA buyer-side question arriving in the wrong place. Answer only what you publish, and never let an assistant improvise a claim you then own.
- A chat widget is part of the public facing service, and so are its answersScreen readers, easy read, translation and non digital routes. What to index so the request does not become an accessibility failure itself.
- Explaining how access works when the diary lives somewhere elseAccess often runs through an employer, insurer or health service, which decides the answer. What to clarify before anybody tries to book.
- Where a request should go depends on who is typing, and the widget cannot tellPatients, clinicians and buyers need three different destinations. How one question sorts them without the assistant claiming to know who is typing.
Try it on your own material
Upload a document or point it at your site, paste one line of HTML, then ask it something only your business could answer.