The sacred container of birth support shouldn’t stop at the birth room door. Here is why we built medical-grade privacy into a soft, supportive space.
If you scroll through birth worker forums or Facebook groups, you’ll constantly see the same advice: “Because a doula is a non-medical professional, HIPAA regulations don’t apply to us.”
Technically, if you look at the rigid legal definitions from decades ago, that might seem true. If you aren’t diagnosing conditions or billing insurance companies directly via standard electronic transactions, you may not fit the traditional legal definition of a “covered entity.”
But focusing purely on the word medical misses the entire point of the deep, protective relationship you have with your clients.
It doesn’t matter what title is on your business card. What matters is the context of your relationship and the sheer volume of sensitive personal information you gather, track, and store.
As a doula or birth agency owner, your families trust you with the most intimate details of their lives. Your intake forms, prenatal summaries, and daily logs contain massive amounts of Protected Health Information (PHI) and electronic PHI (ePHI), including:
Storing this level of raw, deeply personal information on unencrypted spreadsheets, generic CRM platforms, or standard email threads isn’t just an administrative risk—it is a breach of the emotional safety net you’ve promised to build for that family. Over 20 states already have laws regarding how professionals like doulas store information – including California, Washington, New York, and more.
We didn’t build BirthFlow to tick a cold, corporate compliance box. We built it because we believe that the protection you provide to your clients in the birth room should extend to how their data is handled online as places like Google Drive are not the best place for personal health infomation (PHI).
Whether the law technically forces a solo practitioner to comply or not, we chose to engineer BirthFlow with medical-grade, end-to-end encryption from day one. When you chart a birth, log a milestone, or accept an intake form inside BirthFlow, you can breathe easy knowing that your professional care records are locked away safely.
Your data is protected both “in transit” (as it travels across the internet from a client’s phone to your dashboard) and “at rest” (while sitting securely in our database). Only you and the team members you explicitly assign have the keys to view it.
For established birth agencies, partnerships, or solo doulas who work closely with hospital networks and are legally classified as covered entities, a BAA is a strict legal requirement. Unlike generic business software platforms that refuse to sign them, BirthFlow confidently signs BAAs to keep your business fully legally compliant.
We believe in relationship infrastructure, not holding your business hostage. We will never sell, analyze, or snoop on your client data for marketing purposes. Your files, histories, and stories belong solely and completely to you.
BirthFlow is built for people like you. People who know that presence is everything.
