A privacy-first nursing app, by design.
Bedside identifiers and brain-sheet contents are designed to stay local by default. Cloud-backed features prohibit PHI, use redaction where available, and stay opt-in.
Most nursing apps treat your phone as a thin client. Your brain sheet syncs to a server you didn’t choose, your habits feed an analytics dashboard you can’t see, and your patient identifiers travel further than they need to. The privacy policy is 4,000 words long for a reason.
RN PocketPal flips this. The default is local. Cloud features are opt-in, PHI-prohibited, and covered by an unintended-PHI deletion policy.
What RN PocketPal does
- No intentional PHI storage. Brain-sheet contents and bedside identifiers live in encrypted local storage by default. RN PocketPal is not a charting system, secure-messaging system, or medical record.
- No third-party trackers.No Google Analytics. No Meta Pixel. No Mixpanel. No Segment. First-party analytics only, and only for things like “how many people viewed the homepage” — never patient content.
- Crash reports are scrubbed. If the app crashes, the crash report scrubs every user-entered text field before transmission. Allowlist approach, not denylist.
- Rhythm review runs on-device where available. Optional training contributions are separate, opt-in, de-identified submissions that go to a private review queue before any model-improvement use.
- You control the educational corpus.If you want to contribute strips to RN PocketPal’s educational training corpus, that’s an explicit opt-in with metadata stripping and de-identification. Off by default.
Who it’s for
Built for nurses who’ve read enough HIPAA training modules to know what’s worth asking about, and for hospital privacy officers evaluating which apps their clinical staff can install on personal devices.
Educational reference only. Not a medical device. Verify with clinical judgment, facility policy, and primary sources. Read the full disclaimer.
Frequently asked questions
- Is RN PocketPal HIPAA compliant?
- RN PocketPal is designed to stay outside HIPAA’s scope in its consumer-app capacity by not intentionally receiving PHI or acting on behalf of a hospital, health plan, or EHR. HIPAA obligations change if RN PocketPal enters a hospital/system arrangement to create, receive, maintain, or transmit PHI on that organization’s behalf; that would require counsel review and a BAA before launch.
- What data does RN PocketPal collect?
- Account-level data, marketplace/account data if you use those features, PHI-free product analytics, support requests, optional AI prompts after redaction, and crash reports with user-entered text scrubbed. Patient-bearing brain-sheet content is local-only by default. The full list lives in the privacy policy.
- What about my Rhythm Reader photos?
- Strip images stay on your iPhone for inference. They are never transmitted to RN PocketPal servers unless you explicitly opt in to the educational corpus contribution feature, in which case the image is stripped of metadata and de-identified before transmission.
- Can my hospital see what I do in the app?
- No. RN PocketPal has no enterprise admin console in v1.0. Your usage is private to you.
- Will this change in future versions?
- If we add features that require cloud sync (e.g. multi-device brain-sheet sync in v1.5), they will be opt-in and clearly described. We will not silently change the privacy posture in a future update.
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Recent updates to the RN PocketPal nurse toolkit across iOS, Android, and web — new features, improvements, and what shipped when.
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Reviewed by RN PocketPal Clinical Team, RN. Last reviewed .