Terms of use

These terms cover your use of Pearls. By creating an account you agree to them. They are short and plain. The section on patient information is a hard rule. Please read it.

What Pearls is

Pearls is a personal notes tool for keeping and organizing your own clinical notes and pearls. It is a generic notebook. Pearls does not provide medical, clinical, or professional advice, does not diagnose or treat, and is not a medical device. Anything in your notes is authored by you; you are responsible for its accuracy and for how you use it in practice.

Pearls is not a medical record, and it is not a system of record for any patient. It is not designed, offered, or certified for storing patient information, and it must not be used as part of any patient’s chart or care documentation. We do not enter into Business Associate Agreements, we make no claim of HIPAA, PHIPA, or equivalent compliance, and we do not offer Pearls to hospitals, clinics, or health systems as a compliant destination for patient data.

No patient information

You must not enter, upload, dictate, paste, or otherwise put patient-identifiable information into Pearls. This applies to every part of the product — notes, case logs, dictation, images, attachments, titles, and search — whether or not you ever make the content public.

Patient-identifiable information means any information that identifies a real person, or that could reasonably be used to identify them, including but not limited to:

• Names, initials, or nicknames of patients, their families, or their contacts.
• Dates of birth, admission, discharge, procedure, or death.
• Medical record numbers, health card or insurance numbers, accession or specimen numbers, or any other identifier assigned by an institution.
• Addresses, phone numbers, email addresses, or any other contact details.
• Photographs, scans, or images containing faces, identifying marks, or embedded identifiers — including metadata and anything visible in the corner of a screenshot.
• Any combination of details that, taken together, would let someone recognize a specific person — for example a rare diagnosis plus a named institution plus an approximate date.

Write about cases in de-identified terms. If you are not certain a note is de-identified, do not put it in Pearls. Removing identifiers is your responsibility, and it must happen before the information reaches us, not afterwards.

If you are a clinician, a student, or anyone else bound by professional, institutional, or legal obligations covering patient information — HIPAA, PHIPA, PIPEDA, your regulatory college, your employer’s policies, or any equivalent — those obligations remain entirely yours. Nothing about using Pearls reduces them, and Pearls is not a permitted destination for information they cover.

Publishing pages publicly

Pearls lets you publish pages to a public web address. Publishing is entirely your choice and your action. When you publish, you are the publisher of that content, and you are responsible for everything in it and for having the right to make it public.

Before you publish anything, understand what publishing means:

• Anyone can read the page without signing in, and publishing a section publishes everything inside it.
• Published pages can be found, indexed by search engines, archived, screenshotted, and copied by others.
• Unpublishing does not undo any of that. We can remove a page from Pearls; we cannot remove it from a search index, a cache, an archive, or someone else’s copy.

We ask you to confirm you understand this before anything of yours can first become public, and we keep a record of that confirmation. The confirmation is a warning, not permission — acknowledging it does not license you to publish patient information.

Reporting a problem with a public page

If you believe a page published through Pearls contains patient information, personal information about you, content published without the right to do so, or anything otherwise unlawful, email privacy@getpearls.app with the URL and a short description of the problem. You do not need a Pearls account to report something, and you do not need to identify the patient to make a report.

We aim to acknowledge reports within 2 business days. Where a report credibly indicates a page contains patient-identifiable information, our practice is to unpublish the page first and investigate afterwards — we would rather take down a page that turns out to be fine than leave one up that isn’t. We will notify the account holder of what was removed and why, and they may respond. We may also suspend an account’s ability to publish, or the account itself, while we look into it.

Please note that removing a page from Pearls does not remove copies that already exist elsewhere on the internet, and we cannot compel third parties to delete them.

Your content is yours

You own the notes you create. You grant us only the limited permission needed to store and display that content back to you as part of running the service — and, for pages you choose to publish, to serve them publicly. We don’t claim ownership and we don’t sell your content.

Acceptable use

• Use Pearls for your own lawful purposes.
• Don’t enter patient-identifiable information, as described above.
• Don’t publish content you don’t have the right to publish, or that infringes someone else’s rights.
• Don’t attempt to break, overload, or gain unauthorized access to the service or other users’ data.
• Don’t upload content you don’t have the right to store.

We may suspend or terminate an account that breaches these rules, and may unpublish or remove content that does. Where it is safe and lawful to tell you first, we will.

Your responsibility for what you put in

You are responsible for the content you enter and for any consequences of entering or publishing it. To the extent permitted by law, you agree to indemnify and hold harmless Pearls and its operators against any claim, demand, regulatory proceeding, loss, or cost (including reasonable legal fees) brought by a third party and arising from content you entered or published in breach of these terms — in particular any claim arising from patient-identifiable information you put into Pearls. Nothing in this paragraph limits rights you have that cannot be waived under applicable law.

Availability & changes

Pearls is provided on an “as is” and “as available” basis while it is early. We may add, change, or remove features, and we may update these terms; material changes will be reflected here with a new “last updated” date. Keep your own backups of anything critical.

Liability

To the extent permitted by law, Pearls is not liable for indirect or consequential damages arising from your use of the service, or for any loss arising from content you chose to enter or publish. Nothing here limits rights you have under applicable law.

Account deletion

You can stop using Pearls at any time and request deletion of your account and content via privacy@getpearls.app. See our Privacy page for how data is handled.

Contact

Questions about these terms? support@getpearls.app.