What patient data AudZone keeps when it connects to your calendar

It's a fair question — and one we hear often, especially from clinicians coming across from tools like Heidi where you never enter a patient's name at all. AudZone is a little different, because it's built to support you across a patient's whole journey rather than one session at a time. So we do hold a small amount of patient information. This article walks through exactly what that looks like.

The short answer first, so you can stop reading here if it's all you needed:

Whether your appointments come into AudZone from CounselEar, from HearAid, or by you uploading them yourself, we only ever keep three pieces of patient information: first name, last name, and date of birth. Nothing else. No phone numbers, no email addresses, no home addresses, no Medicare or voucher numbers, unless you enter them yourself later on.

If you'd like the longer version — including where the data is stored, who can see it, and why we ask for those three pieces at all — read on.

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The three ways your appointments get into AudZone

There are three different paths your day's appointments can take to reach AudZone. Each one is set up differently, but the patient information that comes through is identical.

If you use CounselEar

When you book or change an appointment in CounselEar, CounselEar lets AudZone know. The note we receive contains the patient's first name, last name, date of birth, and an internal CounselEar ID number — the ID is just so we know which appointment matches which patient on your end.

That's all. No phone, email, address, voucher numbers, or anything else from the CounselEar patient record makes it across to us.

• Requires the AudZone Webhook to be set up in AudZone.

If you use HearAid

The HearAid path works the same way. When HearAid sends your appointments to AudZone, the patient information in the message is again only first name, last name, date of birth, and HearAid's internal patient ID.

This linking requires HearAid's $300 paid integratio avaliable from HearAid directly.

If you import your schedule manually

Some clinics aren't on either system, or are still trialling AudZone alongside another tool. You can bring your day's appointments in yourself, by:

• Pasting a screenshot of your schedule

• Uploading a CSV file

• Typing them in directly

If your screenshot or CSV happens to include extra columns like phone numbers, emails, addresses, or voucher numbers, we ignore them. AudZone is designed only to read first name, last name, and date of birth from what you import. Anything else in the file is dropped before the appointment is saved.

So no matter which of the three paths you use, the answer to "what does AudZone hold about my patients?" is the same.

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What AudZone never receives

To be completely explicit, none of the following ever come into AudZone through the calendar:

• Phone numbers

• Email addresses

• Home or postal addresses

• Medicare card numbers

• HSP voucher numbers

• DVA file numbers

• NDIS participant numbers

• Insurance details

• Next-of-kin or emergency contacts

• Any prior clinical history from your other system

If those exist on the patient's record in CounselEar or HearAid, they stay in CounselEar or HearAid. They don't come across to us, unless you enter them manually in the AudZone patient slide out or use AudZone CRM (obviously)

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Where your patient data lives

It stays in Australia

Your patient information, your recordings, your transcripts, and the notes you generate are all stored on servers in Sydney. They don't leave Australia. This is part of how AudZone meets the data-residency expectations of HSP.

It's encrypted at rest

The information sitting on our servers is encrypted, in two layers — once by the cloud provider that runs our database, and a second time by AudZone for the most sensitive fields. Practically, this means that even someone who somehow got access to the storage drives would see only encrypted text, not readable patient information.

It's locked to your clinic only

Every patient record in AudZone is tied to your clinic. Other clinics on AudZone cannot see your patients. AudZone staff cannot see your patients without your explicit permission. Unauthenticated visitors cannot see your patients. The only people who can see them are the users you've added to your AudZone clinic.

You can read the longer technical version of all of this on our public security page at audzone.com.au/security.

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Why we ask for any patient information at all

This is the bit that's worth understanding, because it gets to the heart of how AudZone differs from a tool like Heidi.

Heidi when used for Audiology works without patient names because each session in Heidi is a stand-alone snapshot. Once the note is generated, the session has done its job. There's no need to remember who the patient was, because nothing carries forward.

AudZone is built around the patient, because so much of what's useful clinically only becomes possible when the platform can join the dots between sessions. With a patient linked, you get:

• Compliance evidence that carries over. For an HSP appointment, things you've already evidenced — a signed quote, a 3FAHL eligibility check, a fresh-enough audiogram — carry forward for up to 60 days. The compliance checker stops asking you to re-evidence what's already there.

• Hearing thresholds tracked over time. When you import an audiogram into a session that has a patient attached, AudZone keeps the values and shows you how that patient's thresholds have changed visit-to-visit, including 3FAHL and 4FAHL averages.

• A patient-counselling tool that uses their own audiogram. Once a patient is linked and their audiogram is uploaded, AudZone unlocks the Hearing Simulator — a counselling tool that lets you play speech samples through the patient's actual hearing loss, in different listening environments (quiet room, cafe, group conversation), with and without hearing aids. It's a powerful way to help a patient — or a family member sitting in with them — actually hear the impact of their hearing loss, rather than just being told about it on a chart.

• Reports and PDFs that pull from previous visits. NDIS reports and longitudinal letters can auto-fill from previous notes for that patient, so you're not retyping the same history in every report.

• COSI tracked across the whole hearing-aid journey. When you set goals at an assessment, AudZone carries them forward so they appear at the fitting, the follow-up, and any later reviews — automatically, without you having to look them up each time.

• Chat with the AI about a patient across their visits. You can ask AudZone questions about a specific patient and it draws on their previous notes and documents, not just today's session.

• A short pre-session brief. Before you walk into a session, AudZone can summarise the last couple of visits for you — what was discussed, what the next step was meant to be — so you're not opening the chart cold.

• Outcome questionnaires. HHIA, COSI, IOI-HA, SSQ12, and others can be sent to the patient by email, scored automatically, and threaded back into their record.

• A clear consent record. For each patient, AudZone keeps an up-to-date record of their recording consent — when it was given, who captured it, the wording they agreed to, and if and when it was withdrawn.

• Schedule that pre-loads everything. When you start a scheduled session, the right templates, the right checklist, and the right compliance documents are already attached based on the appointment type. With walk-in sessions, you choose those each time by hand.

• A bundled patient export. When a patient asks for a copy of their record — for an insurance claim, for handover to another clinic, for their own files — you can produce a single PDF of their AudZone history in a click.

None of this is possible without a patient on the session, because there'd be nothing to thread the information onto.

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What if you'd rather use AudZone the Heidi way?

You can. AudZone supports walk-in sessions that aren't tied to a patient record. You can start a walk-in, choose the appointment type at the moment of recording, generate the note, and never enter a patient name.

The trade-off is exactly what you'd expect: each walk-in is a one-off snapshot. The compliance carry-forward, the longitudinal reports, the pre-session brief, the patient export, the cross-session chat — none of those apply, because there's no patient for them to attach to.

Some clinicians use a mix: walk-ins for quick ad-hoc consults (wax checks, tube changes, a hearing aid drop-off) and patient-linked sessions for the appointments where the longer view actually matters (assessments, fittings, reviews). That's a perfectly reasonable way to work.

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In summary

• The most sensitive patient data — phone, email, address, voucher numbers — never automatically comes into AudZone in the first place

• The little we do hold (first name, last name, DOB) is encrypted, stored in Sydney, and visible only to your clinic

• We ask for those three pieces because the patient is the thread that lets the platform do everything that makes it useful clinically

• If you'd prefer to keep things fully anonymous, walk-in sessions let you do that — at the cost of the cross-session features

If anything here is unclear or you'd like to talk it through, please reply to any AudZone email or contact us through the in-app help button. We're happy to go through it with you.

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