Industries / Healthcare
Answers your privacy officer can defend.
People rely on the information that you provide to make critical healthcare decisions. You need to find the information you need and to verify that it is up to date and accurate. In your world information moves at the speed of health. Find and verify protected health information without compromising on security or privacy. Cognatum gives you approved sources and enforces permissions.
Without Cognatum
Was that allowed to be said?
“I do not need the AI to be clever. I need to know who approved what it just said.”
Before an assistant answers a member or a clinician, privacy and quality each ask whether the right people signed off first.
Coverage policy, clinical protocol and member notices live in different systems, and each has its own approval path.
An assistant reading uncontrolled content answers from a retired policy, a draft notice, and a protocol two revisions old.
A coverage policy changes and the answers built on the old one keep being given, because nothing links them. Nobody signed off on those answers, and no record says what was disclosed to whom.
Yes. It is covered with no prior authorization requirement, at the standard coinsurance rate.
No source · no approver · no date
Why this industry
What a privacy review asks.
Three things decide whether an assistant reaches a clinical or member-facing workflow. Each one turns on whether the record behind the answer exists.
- Minimum necessary. What is disclosed is limited to what the request needs. Clearance is decided when the answer is made, so two people asking the same question can get different answers, or none.
- Documentation. Policies and procedures have to be written down and kept for years after they stop being current. Every superseded version is retained, so what an entry said on a date is a lookup.
- Design and complaint records. For device makers, what was decided and why has to trace to an approved source. Approval happens once, before use, and the assistant serves only what passed it.
What we will not claim
None of this makes your organization compliant with HIPAA, with payer or provider requirements, or with any device regulation, and no software could. Those duties attach to your records, your processes and your quality system.
What you get is evidence toward them: numbered entries, approvals attributed to identified people, a change history, and a record of every request that was refused.
Which retention period applies to client trade communications?
Entry SOP-4471
- v4 In force
Retention extended to seven years for client trade communications.
D. Whitfield, Records management · 2026-07-02
- v3 Superseded · retained
Chat channels brought into scope.
D. Whitfield, Records management · 2025-11-14
- v2 Superseded · retained
Exception process added for legal hold.
M. Alvarez, Compliance · 2025-03-09
- v1 Superseded · retained
First approved version.
M. Alvarez, Compliance · 2024-06-18
→ what the entry said on a date is a lookup
With Cognatum
Five things that need approving.
What an assistant answers from here is drawn from material that already requires controlled review. An answer taken from it inherits that requirement.
Coverage and policy
The policy in force
What is covered, and what is indicated, is decided by a policy with an effective date. The entry names the revision it came from.
Notices and consent
Wording that was reviewed
Notice and consent language is reviewed before it is used. It comes back word for word from the current revision, never summarised.
Disclosure rules
Answers stop at the boundary
What comes back is decided by who is asking, at the point the answer is made. A refusal is recorded rather than silent.
Design records
What was decided, and why
For device makers, design decisions are asked about for the life of the product. The entry carries the approver and the source.
Complaints
As recorded, not remembered
How a complaint was classified, investigated and closed is knowledge the next one needs. It is served the way it was written down.
Why not search
An index cannot keep a secret.
Search finds the document and shows it to whoever ranked highest. That is a different job from deciding who may receive the answer.
Relevance has no view on permission. A retrieval system returns the best match for the query, not the best match this person is allowed to see.
A system of record stores the approved answer itself, and the decision about who receives it is made when the answer is assembled, and the wording it serves is the wording that was approved.
Returned word for word
“You have the right to request a restriction on how your health information is used or disclosed. We are not required to agree to a requested restriction, except as required by law.”
D-529 · v3
- Member portal Unchanged
- Intake packet Unchanged
- AI assistant Refused
What was refused
Asked to send “We do not have to agree to your request” in place of “We are not required to agree to a requested restriction”. Rewording approved text is refused, not corrected.
Frameworks
What each framework asks.
| Instrument | What it asks of you | What we supply toward it |
|---|---|---|
| HIPAA Security Rule, 45 CFR Part 164 | That policies and procedures are documented, and that the documentation is retained for six years after it was last in effect. | Every superseded version is retained with the dates it applied, so producing what was live on a given date is a lookup. |
| HIPAA Privacy Rule, 45 CFR Part 164 | That a disclosure is limited to the minimum necessary for the purpose it serves. | Clearance is applied when the answer is made rather than only at the record store, and every refusal is logged with who asked. |
| The HITECH Act | That business associates carry the same safeguards as the organizations they serve. | The same approval gate and the same clearance apply wherever an entry is served, including to an agent acting for somebody. |
| 21 CFR Part 820, the Quality Management System Regulation | For device manufacturers, a quality system built on ISO 13485:2016 with the agency additions on top of it. | Approvals are recorded with the approver, the timestamp and the source version, and the record is kept rather than overwritten. |
| ISO 13485:2016 | That documents are controlled, and that changes are reviewed and approved before release. | Version history and approval sit on the entry itself, not in a separate log that has to be reconciled. |
This table describes obligations that fall on your organization, and the evidence Cognatum produces toward them. It is not a claim of certification or conformity, ours or yours.
In practice
Is this member allowed to hear that?
A service team asks the assistant a coverage question for a member whose plan changed this year.
The answer comes from the policy revision in force for that plan, with its effective date and the person who approved it.
What the asker is not cleared to receive does not appear, and the refusal is recorded with who asked and when.
Before the audit, the privacy office reads the access and refusal record rather than assembling evidence from scratch.
Requests in
One assistant, one asker
- Approved disclosure language
- Current supervisory procedure
- A draft nobody has signed
- An entry retired last quarter
Served
With approver, date, version
-
Disclosure D-214 rev 6
J. Mercer · approved 2026-07-14
-
Procedure WSP-11 v4
Supervision · approved 2026-06-30
Not served
Not fetchable at all
-
Draft entry
No approval on record
-
Retired entry
Archived 2026-04-11
Common questions
What privacy and quality teams ask first.
What do we show an auditor who asks how AI answers are controlled?
The record. Every entry the assistant answers from carries a named approver, an approval date, a version history, and the source behind it, and every refused request is logged with who asked. How that fits your privacy program is a decision for your privacy officer and counsel.
Does this make us compliant with HIPAA?
No, and no software can. HIPAA attaches to your organization, your records and your workforce, and a regulator assesses how you operate rather than what you bought. What you get is evidence toward your duties.
How does minimum necessary work when an agent is asking?
An agent answers within the clearance of the person it acts for. What that person could not have opened does not come back, and the refusal is recorded rather than silent.
Our policies already live in a document system. Why another store?
That system governs the document. AI does not serve documents, it serves answers taken out of them, and that extraction is where control is lost. This governs the answer, and records the document behind it.
A coverage policy changed mid-year. How does the old answer stop?
The moment the new entry is approved it is what the assistant serves, on every channel at once. The old version is archived with the dates it applied, so a question about a claim from March still has an answer.
Can member-facing language be served through AI without losing control?
That is the design case. The approved wording is the entry. It is permissioned, versioned, and served over the same controlled interface as everything else, so an assistant quotes rather than restates.
Knowledge governed. Intelligence everywhere.
See it on your own content, in your own environment.