Incident report data retention

What CareGuard does not keep

No copy of any incident report. Not an archive, not a backup, not a log of what was in it.

Does CareGuard keep a copy of incident reports?

CareGuard acts as a facilitator of the reporting process. Reports are transmitted to the facility’s designated legal counsel and to ownership; CareGuard does not retain, store or hold them.

What does keeping no copy protect?

• CareGuard cannot be subpoenaed for a report it does not have, and cannot be drawn into a proceeding as a custodian of records about your facility.
• There is one fewer copy of a sensitive document in the world — one fewer place it can be breached, leaked or mishandled.
• The person reporting is not entering their concern into a database that persists somewhere they cannot see.

What are the trade-offs of keeping no copy?

• No status updates to the person who reported. There is nothing here to look up.
• No trend dashboard. Aggregation, if an owner wants it, has to be built on their side.
• No recovery. If ownership loses the report, CareGuard cannot resend it.

Those are real trade-offs and they are stated here rather than discovered later. The same question from ownership’s side.

What the agreement says

The arrangement between CareGuard and a facility puts this in writing rather than leaving it as a practice: CareGuard acts as a facilitator of the incident reporting process and shall not retain, store or have access to submitted reports; it transmits them to the facility’s legal counsel and keeps no records of submissions. It is a contractual term, not a policy that can quietly drift.

What should a facility build on its own side?

• Its own retention. Counsel’s copy is the only copy.
• Its own triage clock. Nobody outside is watching a queue.
• Its own aggregation, if it wants to see patterns across buildings.
• Its own feedback loop. A channel that never visibly produces a repair stops being used.

What the person reporting is told

Exactly this, above the link, on every page of this site that offers the form: that the report goes to ownership and its attorneys, that CareGuard is not a regulator and keeps no copy, and that it does not replace emergency or state reporting. Nobody is left to discover it afterwards.

Frequently asked questions

Can CareGuard be subpoenaed for an incident report?

CareGuard cannot be subpoenaed for a report it does not have. Reports are transmitted to the facility’s designated legal counsel and to ownership, and CareGuard does not retain, store or hold them. It cannot be drawn into a proceeding as a custodian of records about the facility, because it keeps none.

What happens after an incident is reported through CareGuard?

The report goes to the facility’s legal counsel and to ownership, and CareGuard keeps nothing. From there the facility runs the process: its own retention, its own triage clock and its own feedback loop. Nobody outside is watching a queue, so a facility that never visibly fixes anything will find the channel stops being used.

Can I check the status of a report I submitted?

No. CareGuard sends no status updates to the person who reported, because there is nothing on its side to look up. That is one of the stated trade-offs of keeping no copy. Any follow-up comes from the facility, which is why a working feedback loop is part of what a facility has to build.

If ownership loses a report, can CareGuard send it again?

No. There is no recovery. Counsel’s copy is the only copy, so the facility has to keep its own retention in place. The same rule means there is one fewer copy of a sensitive document in the world, and one fewer place it can be breached, leaked or mishandled.

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