Who these Terms apply to
These Terms apply to any person or organisation that creates an account, subscribes to, accesses or uses Blue Merino.
Where a clinic, practice or other organisation pays for or provides access to Blue Merino, that organisation is the Customer.
A practitioner or other person permitted by the Customer to use Blue Merino is an Authorised User.
If you accept these Terms on behalf of a clinic or other organisation, you confirm that you have authority to bind that organisation to these Terms.
Patients whose information is processed through Blue Merino are not parties to these Terms.
What Blue Merino does
Blue Merino is an AI-assisted clinical documentation and workflow tool designed for allied-health practitioners.
Depending on the features you use, Blue Merino may assist with tasks such as:
- transcribing or processing consultation audio;
- drafting clinical notes;
- preparing pre-consultation patient briefings;
- assisting with dictation;
- drafting letters, referrals, reports and treatment plans;
- summarising relevant documents or information; and
- transferring practitioner-approved information into connected practice-management systems.
Blue Merino produces drafts. You remain responsible for reviewing generated content before it becomes part of the clinical record.
Blue Merino is a documentation and administrative aid.
It does not provide medical or other clinical advice, make diagnoses, prescribe treatment, replace clinical assessment or professional judgement, or provide an emergency healthcare service.
You must not use Blue Merino as a substitute for your own professional judgement or for any purpose for which it is not designed.
Who may use Blue Merino
Blue Merino is intended for appropriately qualified, registered, accredited or otherwise authorised allied-health practitioners and their clinics, together with authorised staff where relevant.
You must only access patient information where you are legally and professionally authorised to do so.
Accounts are issued to individual users unless we expressly agree otherwise. You must not share your login credentials or allow another person to use your account.
You are responsible for maintaining the confidentiality and security of your account credentials and for promptly telling us if you believe your account has been compromised.
Your professional responsibilities
Blue Merino assists with documentation. It does not assume responsibility for the care of your patients or the accuracy and completeness of their clinical records.
You remain responsible for:
- the healthcare services you provide;
- exercising your own independent professional judgement;
- maintaining accurate and appropriate clinical records;
- complying with the standards, codes and requirements that apply to your profession;
- determining whether information generated by Blue Merino is appropriate to include in a patient's record or any other clinical document; and
- meeting your legal, privacy, consent and record-keeping obligations.
Review of generated content
Content generated by Blue Merino is a draft unless and until you review and approve it.
AI systems and speech-recognition systems can misunderstand, omit, incorrectly interpret or generate information.
Before relying on, sending, publishing or adding generated content to a clinical record, you must review it and satisfy yourself that it is accurate, complete and appropriate.
This applies to clinical notes and to other generated material, including letters, referrals, reports, treatment plans, patient briefings and summaries.
You should not rely on generated content where doing so would be inconsistent with your professional obligations or reasonable clinical judgement.
Patient consent and consultation recording
You are responsible for determining what patient notice or consent is required before using Blue Merino in a consultation.
Where required by law, professional standards or your clinic's policies, you must:
- explain the use of recording, transcription or AI-assisted documentation to the patient;
- obtain appropriate consent before using the relevant feature;
- respect a patient's decision not to consent or to withdraw consent where applicable; and
- ensure any other person participating in the consultation is appropriately informed or has provided consent where required.
Consent remains your responsibility. Blue Merino does not obtain patient consent on behalf of a practitioner or clinic.
You must not record, upload or process a consultation or other information through Blue Merino if you are not authorised to do so.
Acceptable use
You may use Blue Merino only for lawful purposes and in accordance with these Terms.
You must not use Blue Merino to:
- access, record, upload or process information you are not authorised to handle;
- breach privacy, health-record, confidentiality or other applicable laws;
- infringe another person's intellectual-property or other rights;
- impersonate another person or misrepresent your authority;
- provide Blue Merino credentials to an unauthorised person;
- attempt to gain unauthorised access to Blue Merino or its underlying systems;
- bypass, disable or interfere with security or access controls;
- introduce malware or other harmful code;
- scrape, probe or systematically extract information from the service except through functionality we expressly provide;
- reverse engineer or attempt to derive source code or non-public components of the service except to the extent that applicable law expressly permits this;
- use Blue Merino to develop or benchmark a competing product using confidential or non-public aspects of the service without our permission;
- use Blue Merino to make autonomous diagnoses, treatment decisions or other clinical decisions for which it is not designed; or
- use the service in a way that creates a material security, legal or operational risk to Blue Merino, another customer or any patient.
We may take reasonable steps to prevent or investigate suspected misuse.
Fair use
Blue Merino is priced per practitioner rather than per note, and we do not meter your ordinary clinical work. Document a full book of patients, regenerate a note you are not happy with, produce the letters and plans your patients need — that is the service working as intended, and there is no quota on it.
What this section is for is the small number of uses that are not ordinary clinical practice: generating documents in volumes that do not correspond to patients you are actually treating, automating or scripting the service, using it as a general-purpose writing tool unrelated to patient care, or running consumption on one practitioner account that plainly reflects the work of several.
If your use looks materially inconsistent with ordinary clinical practice, we may apply reasonable limits to your account, or discuss a plan that better fits how you work. We will contact you first and give you a reasonable opportunity to explain or adjust, except where the use presents an immediate security, legal or operational risk. We will not use this section to penalise a busy clinic.
Where use materially beyond ordinary clinical practice continues, additional usage-based fees may apply. We would tell you before any such fee was charged, and you would be free to cancel instead.
Customer Content and clinical records
For these Terms, Customer Content means information that you or your clinic provides to Blue Merino or permits Blue Merino to access, including patient information, consultation content, audio, clinical records, documents and templates.
As between you and Blue Merino, you retain your existing rights in Customer Content.
You give us a limited right to access, process, transmit, reproduce and otherwise handle Customer Content only to the extent reasonably necessary to:
- provide the Blue Merino service;
- operate integrations you have authorised;
- secure, maintain and support the service;
- troubleshoot problems;
- comply with law; and
- otherwise use the information as described in our Privacy Policy or as agreed with you.
You are responsible for ensuring that you have the rights, permissions and authority necessary for us to process Customer Content in this way.
We do not claim ownership of your patients' clinical records.
Generated content
Blue Merino may generate notes, summaries, letters and other material based on Customer Content and your instructions.
Subject to our rights in the underlying Blue Merino technology and any third-party rights, we do not claim ownership of clinical content generated specifically for you from your Customer Content.
Generated content may not be unique. Similar content may be generated for different users where they provide similar information or instructions.
Your responsibility to review generated content under section 4 applies regardless of whether Blue Merino has previously generated accurate content for you.
Privacy and health information
Blue Merino processes sensitive health information in providing the service.
Our collection, handling, storage, use and disclosure of personal information is described in our Privacy Policy.
You and your clinic remain responsible for your own obligations under applicable Commonwealth, State and Territory privacy, health-record, confidentiality and professional requirements.
Where we process patient information on behalf of your clinic in providing Blue Merino, we do so for the purpose of providing the service and in accordance with our applicable privacy obligations and contractual commitments.
Nothing in these Terms permits either party to use patient information in a manner that is prohibited by applicable law.
Connected services and Cliniko
Blue Merino may integrate with third-party services such as Cliniko.
By connecting a third-party account to Blue Merino, you confirm that:
- you are authorised to access and connect that account;
- you are authorised to permit Blue Merino to exchange information with it; and
- you will comply with the terms that apply to that third-party service.
You authorise Blue Merino to access and exchange information with the connected service to the extent necessary to provide the features you request.
Third-party services are operated independently from Blue Merino and may change, experience outages or discontinue functionality.
We are not responsible for the operation of a third-party service or for an outage or failure caused solely by that service, except to the extent required by law.
You remain responsible for confirming that information intended for a patient's permanent clinical record has been correctly transferred to and recorded in your practice-management system.
Our intellectual property
Blue Merino and its underlying software, systems, interfaces, workflows, designs, branding and other technology are owned by us or our licensors and are protected by intellectual-property laws.
Subject to these Terms and payment of applicable subscription fees, we grant you a limited, non-exclusive, non-transferable and revocable right to access and use Blue Merino for your internal professional or clinic purposes during your subscription.
This licence does not transfer ownership of Blue Merino or its underlying technology to you.
If you provide feedback or suggestions about Blue Merino, you allow us to use that feedback to improve the service. This does not give us rights to your patient information or clinical records.
Free trial
Eligible new users may receive a 14-day free trial, unless a different trial period is stated when you sign up.
The trial provides access to the features described at signup and is intended to allow you to evaluate Blue Merino.
We will clearly tell you before you begin a trial whether payment details are required and whether the subscription will automatically commence when the trial ends.
If your trial converts automatically to a paid subscription, this will be disclosed during signup.
We may limit free trials to one per practitioner, clinic or other reasonable eligibility criterion to prevent misuse of trial offers.
Subscription, pricing and payment
After any applicable trial, continued use of paid Blue Merino features requires a subscription.
Unless stated otherwise:
- subscription prices are quoted in Australian dollars;
- prices include GST where stated;
- subscriptions are charged per practitioner;
- subscriptions are billed monthly; and
- payment is processed by our payment provider, currently Stripe.
Automatic renewal
Your subscription automatically renews at the end of each monthly billing period unless you cancel it before the next renewal date.
By maintaining a paid subscription, you authorise us and our payment provider to charge your nominated payment method the applicable subscription fee when it becomes due.
Failed payments
If a payment fails, we may make reasonable further attempts to process it and may ask you to update your payment details.
If an amount remains unpaid, we may suspend paid access after giving reasonable notice where practicable.
Price changes
We may change our subscription prices from time to time.
If a price change affects an existing paid subscription, we will give you reasonable advance notice before the new price applies.
If you do not wish to continue at the new price, you may cancel your subscription before the new price takes effect.
Cancellation and refunds
You may cancel your subscription at any time using the cancellation method available in your account or by contacting us.
Unless we tell you otherwise, cancellation takes effect at the end of your current paid billing period and you may continue using the paid service until that date.
We will not charge another subscription period after your cancellation takes effect.
Fees already paid are generally non-refundable for a change of mind or unused time during a billing period.
However, nothing in these Terms excludes any refund, cancellation right or other remedy you are entitled to under the Australian Consumer Law or another applicable law.
Service availability and changes
We aim to provide a reliable and secure service, but no online service can be guaranteed to operate without interruption.
Blue Merino may occasionally be unavailable because of maintenance, updates, faults, internet or infrastructure issues, third-party outages, security events or circumstances outside our reasonable control.
We may update, improve or modify the service over time.
We will take reasonable steps not to materially reduce the core functionality of a paid subscription during an existing billing period without a legitimate reason.
Where a material change substantially disadvantages you, we will provide reasonable notice where practicable and any rights required by applicable law.
Security
We maintain administrative, technical and organisational measures designed to protect the information processed through Blue Merino.
More information about our security and data-handling practices is available in our Privacy Policy and Security information.
No technology or method of electronic transmission or storage is completely secure. You must also take reasonable steps to protect your own devices, accounts, credentials and practice-management systems.
If you become aware of suspected unauthorised access involving your Blue Merino account, you should notify us promptly.
Suspension
We may temporarily suspend access to some or all of Blue Merino where reasonably necessary to:
- protect the security or integrity of the service;
- prevent unauthorised access or misuse;
- respond to a credible risk to patient information;
- comply with law or a lawful direction;
- address material non-payment; or
- investigate a material breach of these Terms.
Where reasonably practicable, we will notify you of the suspension and the reason for it and will restore access once the relevant issue has been resolved.
We will not exercise this right arbitrarily.
Ending these Terms
You may stop using Blue Merino and close your account at any time.
We may terminate your access where:
- you materially breach these Terms and, where the breach is capable of remedy, do not remedy it within a reasonable period after we notify you;
- continued provision of the service would breach applicable law;
- continued use presents a serious security or privacy risk;
- you engage in fraud, deliberate misuse or unlawful activity; or
- we discontinue Blue Merino, in which case we will provide reasonable notice where practicable.
Termination does not affect rights or obligations that arose before termination.
What happens to information when your account ends
Before closing your account, you are responsible for ensuring that any clinical information required for your records has been appropriately saved to your practice-management or record-keeping system.
Blue Merino is not intended to replace your clinic's permanent clinical-record system.
An export of your records is available on request at any time while your account is active, and throughout the 90-day period that follows account closure.
Following termination or account closure, Customer Content will be retained or deleted in accordance with our Privacy Policy, applicable law and any contractual retention requirements.
Some limited information may need to be retained for purposes such as billing, security, audit, dispute resolution or legal compliance.
AI and service limitations
Blue Merino uses automated technologies that can produce incorrect, incomplete or unexpected results.
Although we design the service to assist clinical documentation workflows, we do not promise that:
- a transcription will capture every spoken word correctly;
- generated content will contain every clinically relevant detail;
- generated content will always use the terminology you would have chosen;
- generated content will be free from errors or omissions;
- the service will be available without interruption; or
- Blue Merino will be suitable for a purpose outside the functionality we expressly describe.
These limitations are why practitioner review remains a fundamental part of using Blue Merino.
Australian Consumer Law
Your statutory rights continue to apply. Nothing in these Terms excludes rights that cannot lawfully be excluded under Australian law.
Nothing in these Terms excludes, restricts or modifies any guarantee, condition, warranty, right or remedy that cannot lawfully be excluded or limited, including rights that may arise under the Australian Consumer Law.
Where the Australian Consumer Law or another applicable law gives you rights or remedies, those rights continue to apply despite anything else in these Terms.
Liability
Nothing in this section limits liability to the extent that it cannot lawfully be excluded or limited.
To the maximum extent permitted by law, neither party is liable to the other for indirect, special or consequential loss that was not reasonably foreseeable, except where applicable law provides otherwise.
Blue Merino is not responsible for a clinical decision made independently by a practitioner or for a practitioner's failure to review generated content where these Terms require that review, except to the extent that the loss was caused or contributed to by our own breach, negligence or other liability that cannot lawfully be excluded.
Subject to rights and liabilities that cannot lawfully be limited, our aggregate liability arising out of or in connection with the paid service will not exceed the greater of (a) the fees you have paid to us in the 12 months before the claim arose, and (b) A$1,000.
Nothing in this section is intended to limit any remedy you have under the Australian Consumer Law that cannot lawfully be limited.
Responsibility for certain claims
You are responsible for losses or claims to the extent they arise from your:
- deliberate unlawful use of Blue Merino;
- knowing provision of patient information you were not authorised to provide;
- material breach of section 6 of these Terms; or
- infringement of another person's rights through content you choose to provide to the service,
except to the extent the loss or claim was caused or contributed to by Blue Merino.
This section does not make you responsible for matters outside your reasonable control or for loss caused by our own acts or omissions.
Changes to these Terms
We may update these Terms as Blue Merino, applicable law or our business changes.
Minor, administrative or clarifying changes may take effect when the updated Terms are published.
If we make a material change that affects your rights or obligations, we will give you reasonable advance notice by email, within Blue Merino or by another reasonable method.
Material changes will not retrospectively remove rights that have already accrued.
If a material change substantially disadvantages you in relation to a paid subscription, you may cancel before the change takes effect, subject to any additional rights you have under applicable law.
Communications
We may send you service-related communications, including notices about your account, billing, security, privacy, material product changes and these Terms.
You are responsible for keeping your account contact details reasonably current.
Marketing communications are handled separately and may be opted out of where required.
General terms
If part of these Terms is found to be invalid or unenforceable, the remaining provisions continue to apply to the extent permitted by law.
A failure by either party to enforce a provision immediately does not waive that party's right to enforce it later.
You may not transfer your rights under these Terms to another person without our consent, except where applicable law permits otherwise.
We may transfer our rights and obligations as part of a genuine restructure, merger, acquisition or sale of the Blue Merino business, provided doing so does not remove rights you have under applicable law.
These Terms, together with our Privacy Policy and any other terms expressly agreed between us and the Customer, form the agreement governing your use of Blue Merino.
Governing law
These Terms are governed by the laws of Victoria, Australia.
Subject to any rights you have to bring proceedings elsewhere under applicable law, the courts of Victoria have jurisdiction in relation to disputes concerning these Terms.
Contact us
If you have questions about these Terms, contact:
Blue Merino
ABN 96 697 506 684
Geelong West VIC 3218
Email: legal@bluemerino.com.au
