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Legal Holds

ChatMD enables healthcare organizations to preserve patient data during malpractice litigation, regulatory investigations, OCR audits, or internal compliance reviews. Holds can target all data for an organization or specific patient conversations and documents. Protected data is excluded from automated retention cleanup until the hold is released.

Why Legal Holds Matter in Healthcare

Healthcare organizations face unique legal preservation requirements:

  • Malpractice litigation may require preserving all records related to a patient's care, including AI-assisted clinical conversations
  • OCR investigations following a breach report require preserving all relevant PHI access records
  • State medical board inquiries may require preserving records related to a specific clinician's practice
  • Internal compliance reviews may require preserving records while investigating potential HIPAA violations

ChatMD's legal hold system ensures that relevant data is preserved regardless of normal retention policies.

Supported Hold Reasons

  • Litigation — Malpractice lawsuit, personal injury claim, or other civil litigation
  • Regulatory investigation — OCR audit, state health department inquiry, CMS investigation
  • Subpoena — Court-ordered production of medical records or AI interaction logs
  • Internal investigation — Compliance review, credentialing investigation, incident response

What Can Be Preserved

Holds can protect any combination of:

  • Audit logs — Records of PHI access
  • Clinical conversations — AI-assisted discussions about patient care
  • Patient documents — Uploaded medical records and clinical notes

Holds can be broad (all data for an organization) or targeted (specific patient conversations or documents), allowing you to preserve only what's relevant while normal retention continues for unrelated data.

Hold Lifecycle

  1. Creation — Hold is created with documented reason, scope, and optional expiration
  2. Active — Protected data is excluded from all retention cleanup
  3. Release — Hold is released with documented reason; data becomes eligible for normal retention

All hold operations are recorded in the tamper-evident audit trail.

Healthcare Scenarios

Malpractice Litigation

When served with a malpractice complaint, create a legal hold targeting all conversations and documents related to the patient, including audit logs showing who accessed what information. Maintain the hold until litigation concludes and the appeals period expires.

OCR Breach Investigation

Following a breach report to HHS, create a hold on all audit logs for the affected time period. Preserve all access records that may be relevant to the investigation until OCR closes the matter.

Credentialing Review

When reviewing a clinician's use of AI assistance, create a targeted hold on conversations involving that clinician and preserve audit logs showing their access patterns. Release after review concludes with documented findings.

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