Usage Policy

This policy applies to everyone who uses Ennora because a care home has given them access: the home’s staff, and family members and other contacts the home invites to the family portal. It forms part of the Ennora Terms of Use and uses the same words: “Ennora”, “we” and “us” mean Ennora Ltd (and “Ennora” also means the service), and “your home” means the care home that gave you access.

Ennora Ltd provides Ennora to your home under a written agreement with your home (“the home’s agreement”). That agreement sets out what your home may use Ennora for. This policy passes on to you the rules in it that affect how you use Ennora. This policy summarises certain requirements that apply to your use of Ennora. You must also comply with any instructions, policies or restrictions communicated by us and/or your home regarding the use of Ennora.

Your home’s own policies, instructions and training also apply, for example on consent, record keeping, confidentiality, safeguarding and devices. Where they are stricter than this policy, follow them. If you are not sure whether something is allowed, ask your home before you go ahead.

Sections 4 to 6 are for staff. Section 9 is mainly for family members. The rest is for everyone.

Ennora helps care home staff write records. A member of staff records a conversation, or dictates afterwards. Ennora turns the speech into text, drafts notes, summaries and the forms the home uses, and shows, for each entry, the words it came from. A person at the home checks and corrects the draft and signs it before it becomes a record.

Depending on what your home has switched on, Ennora can also help staff prepare shift handovers and reports, answer questions from a resident’s own records (showing the records it used), draft updates to families, and suggest items such as tags, care plan observations or charges for a person to accept or reject. Through the family portal, a home can share updates with a resident’s family, and the family can reply.

Use Ennora only for the purposes and use cases your home has approved under the home’s agreement, and only at the places it has approved. Your home will tell you what these are. For example, a home may approve recording discussions between staff about residents’ care but not conversations with residents themselves. If you are not sure whether something is approved, ask before you record.

Everything Ennora produces is a draft. A form becomes a record only when a person signs it. A family update is sent only when a person sends it. A suggestion takes effect only when a person accepts it. Ennora does not write to your home’s records on its own.

Ennora is a tool for writing records and is not intended for use as a medical device. Ennora Ltd is not a health or social care provider and does not provide care. The care of residents, and every decision about it, stays with your home and its staff.

Unless the home’s agreement expressly allows it, you must not use Ennora:

1. to diagnose, prevent, monitor, predict, prognose or treat a medical condition;
2. to provide clinical decision support or treatment recommendations;
3. to make safeguarding, medication or treatment decisions;
4. for emergency monitoring or response. Ennora does not watch for emergencies and will not raise an alarm. In an emergency, follow your home’s procedure and call 999 where needed;
5. for consultations or other direct conversations with residents; or
6. for anything outside the purposes and use cases your home has approved.

Even where a use is allowed, you must never:

1. use Ennora as the only basis for any clinical, care, safeguarding or other decision about a resident, a member of staff or anyone else;
2. use Ennora to make automated decisions about anyone, meaning decisions made by software without a person’s meaningful involvement. Every decision must be made by a person who has considered the facts; or
3. record anyone covertly (section 4.3).

Ennora does not diagnose, name conditions or give clinical advice, and it never identifies anyone from their voice. It can tell one voice from another within a recording, but a person confirms who was speaking. If something Ennora produces seems to suggest a diagnosis or a treatment, do not rely on it: use your professional judgement and follow your home’s procedures.

Some features are switched off unless your home has agreed to them. Do not try to use a feature your home has not approved.

Your home decides whether recording is appropriate, on what lawful basis, what people must be told, and when consent or other agreement is needed. Follow your home’s process every time.

Before you start recording:

1. check that the conversation is one your home has approved for recording (section 2.3);
2. tell everyone present that you are about to record, why, and that Ennora will turn what is said into a draft record, using any wording your home has given you;
3. follow your home’s process for consent or agreement. If a resident may lack capacity to agree, follow your home’s process under the Mental Capacity Act 2005, and do not record unless that process allows it; and
4. when Ennora asks you to confirm that the resident was told and agreed, or that everyone being recorded has agreed, confirm it only if it is true. Your answer is recorded.

Never record covertly. Do not record anyone without telling them, hide the fact that you are recording, or leave Ennora recording to capture a conversation you are not part of.

If anyone objects, or withdraws their agreement, stop or pause the recording straight away and do not record them. If what was recorded should not be kept, discard the recording and tell your home, which will decide what happens next.

Pause or stop the recording when the conversation moves on to something that should not be recorded, or when someone joins who has not been told.

Do not record conversations your home has told you not to record. Unless your home has approved it, these include, for example:

1. conversations with anyone who has not been told, or who has objected;
2. private conversations between a resident and their family, visitors, advocate, lawyer or doctor;
3. intimate or personal care;
4. personal calls and conversations that are not about work;
5. disciplinary, grievance and other employment matters; and
6. any other conversations on your home’s list.

Record only on devices your home has approved. Do not record on a personal device unless your home’s policy allows it.

Put into Ennora only what is needed for the purpose your home has approved.

Do not put in information your home has told you is not permitted under the home’s agreement.

Do not put in bank or card details, or personal information that has nothing to do with residents’ care or your home’s work.

Treat everything Ennora produces as a draft, however complete it looks. Before anything Ennora produces is relied on, shared, used to make a decision or added to a resident’s record, a member of staff whom your home has trained and authorised must review it, verify it, correct it where needed and approve it.

Reviewing properly means:

1. reading the whole draft, not skimming it, paying most attention to anything that would change what someone does next;
2. checking that it is about the right resident and the right people;
3. opening the words behind any entry that looks surprising, matters for care, or is a number, such as a weight, a dose, a time, a fluid amount or a score;
4. correcting anything that is wrong or missing before you sign, rather than signing and correcting later;
5. removing anything that should not be in the record;
6. reading a family update as the family will read it before you send it; and
7. accepting a suggestion (such as a code, an observation or a charge) only if it clearly follows from what was recorded, one at a time.

When you sign, Ennora records your name and the time. Signing confirms that you have checked the record and that it is accurate. It is not a formality. If you do not have time to check a draft properly, do not sign it: tell your manager.

When a record is wrong. Before sign-off, correct the draft and sign the corrected version. Do not sign something you know is wrong intending to fix it later. After sign-off, a record cannot be changed: follow your home’s procedure for correcting it. The correction is added as a new entry, and the original, the correction and who made it all stay in the audit record. A record of a correction is worth more than a record that appears never to have needed one.

Ennora uses speech recognition and language models. They make mistakes, and some mistakes look convincing. Ennora can:

1. mishear words, names, medicines, places and numbers, especially names that sound alike;
2. attribute words to the wrong person;
3. miss things that were said, or leave out context;
4. put an entry in the wrong field, or fill a field from something that was said with a different meaning; and
5. produce fluent, confident text that is wrong.

Accuracy falls when the room is noisy (televisions, alarms, several conversations at once); when people speak over each other; when speech is quiet, fast or indistinct, or comes from someone with a speech difficulty; when the speaker has a strong accent, speaks another language or switches between languages; and when numbers are said quickly. Check those records with more care, not less.

Ennora shows the words it drew each entry from. That tells you where an entry came from, not that it is correct: if someone says something mistaken, Ennora will faithfully record the mistake. The words tell you what to check, not what to conclude. Do not read fluent output as accurate output.

Ennora depends on other services and on your connection, and may sometimes be slow or unavailable. You must be able to continue recording and documenting care in accordance with your home’s procedures if Ennora is unavailable.

Use only your own account. Do not share your password, and do not let anyone use Ennora while you are signed in.

Sign out when you finish, especially on a shared computer, and lock your phone or tablet when you step away. The care portal signs you out after 15 minutes without activity, but do not rely on that.

Use Ennora only on devices your home allows, kept up to date and protected by a passcode.

Keep what you see in Ennora confidential, as clause 6 of the Terms of Use requires. Look only at the records you need for your work. Do not copy, download, screenshot or share records except as your work requires and your home’s policies allow, and never into personal email, messaging apps, social media or AI tools your home has not approved.

For family members and other contacts:

1. use the family portal only to keep in touch with the home about your relative;
2. keep your sign-in details private and do not let anyone else use your account. If someone else in your family would like access, ask the home;
3. do not use the family portal for emergencies or urgent concerns, as messages may not be read straight away. If you are worried about your relative’s immediate safety or health, telephone the home, and in an emergency call 999;
4. raise any concern about your relative’s care, or any safeguarding concern, directly with the home through its usual contacts or its complaints procedure. You can also contact the local authority or the care regulator (in England, the Care Quality Commission);
5. be respectful. Do not send anything abusive, threatening, harassing, discriminatory, obscene or unlawful, to staff or to anyone else;
6. send only pictures, videos and voice notes you are entitled to share, and do not send pictures or recordings of other residents, visitors or staff without their agreement; and
7. keep confidential what you see about other residents, their families and staff, and do not share it or post it online (clause 6.4 of the Terms of Use).

Updates come from the home. Staff write and send them, and may use Ennora to help draft them; but a person at the home always checks, edits where necessary, and sends each one. If something looks wrong, tell the home. No AI reads the messages, pictures, videos or voice notes you send.

Your home decides who has access to the family portal and what each person sees, and may pause or end access.

For staff sending updates to families: send updates only to the contacts your home has approved, and check each one before you send it (section 6.2). Respect each contact’s choices, including whether they have agreed to see pictures, and never include information about other residents. If Ennora flags that a message may touch on abuse or self-harm, read the finding and follow your home’s safeguarding procedure before deciding whether to send it.

You must not:

1. let anyone your home has not authorised use Ennora, or use Ennora to provide services to anyone other than your home;
2. copy, modify, frame, mirror, republish, download or distribute any part of Ennora’s software, or reverse engineer, decompile or disassemble it, except where the law allows this;
3. try to get round security measures or access restrictions, or test or probe Ennora’s security without our written agreement;
4. use Ennora, or anything learned from it, to build, train, validate or benchmark a competing product or service;
5. upload a virus or other harmful code, or do anything that could damage, overload or disrupt Ennora; or
6. send, store or share anything that is unlawful, harmful, threatening, defamatory, obscene, infringing, harassing, racially or ethnically offensive or otherwise discriminatory, that shows sexually explicit images, that promotes unlawful violence or helps anyone break the law, or that causes damage or injury to any person or property.

If a resident may have been harmed, or is at risk, follow your home’s incident and safeguarding procedures first. Your duties to the resident, to your home and to regulators come first.

Then tell your home, and us at contact@ennora.ai, as soon as you can about:

1. any suspected security incident, such as someone else using your account, a lost or stolen device that is signed in to Ennora, or information seen by someone who should not have seen it;
2. any concern about safety, privacy or quality, including where Ennora produced something wrong that mattered, or something wrong that got past review and into a record;
3. anything Ennora recorded that it should not have, or anyone recorded without being told; and
4. the same error happening again and again, even if no one was harmed. A near miss is worth reporting.

When you report to us, tell us as far as you can what Ennora produced and what it should have produced, whether it was caught at review or reached a record, whether anyone was affected, the date, time and record reference, and anything about the room or the language spoken that may be relevant. Do not include a resident’s name or other identifying details: the date, time and record reference are enough for us to find it.

We will acknowledge your report within three working days and work with your home on what happened. Where a fault is ours, we will say so. Where it affects other homes, we will tell them without identifying yours.

Reporting to us does not replace your home’s own duties to report, for example to the care regulator, the local authority or the Information Commissioner’s Office. Those stay with your home.

If you break this policy, we may disable access to the material concerned, and suspend or end your access as clause 9 of the Terms of Use allows. We may tell your home.

Your home may also take action under its own policies, including disciplinary action.

Some misuse is also against the law. For example, obtaining or disclosing personal data without your home’s permission can be a criminal offence under the Data Protection Act 2018.

We may update this policy as Ennora, the law or the home’s agreement changes, in the way clause 11 of the Terms of Use describes. Each version shows its number and date.

If you have a question about this policy, ask your home or write to us at contact@ennora.ai.