Reference
Privacy and data handling
What never leaves the pharmacy machine
- Screenshots. Failure screenshots can contain patient information, so they
are written to
%USERPROFILE%\.pharmautomate\screenshots\and are never uploaded. The Transactions detail page shows a path, not an image — and that path only opens on that machine. - Your DocuTrack and QS1 credentials. The agent never has them. A person signs in to both applications.
- Document images and PDFs. Not uploaded.
Patient names
Where a document's patient has to be identified across systems, the agent sends a one-way hash of the name and date of birth, never the name itself. The hash lets the same patient be recognised without the portal ever holding the name.
The agent keeps no local database — everything it records goes to the PharmAutomate service.
Log lines
Log lines are redacted on the pharmacy machine, before they are sent anywhere:
- patient names become
presentornot found - Rx numbers keep only their last four digits
- dates of birth and similar identifiers are stripped
Redacted lines are streamed to the portal's live log, held in memory for roughly half an hour, and never written to the database.
Note: If your organisation would prefer no log streaming at all, it can be switched off per machine in the agent's configuration. Ask Skypond support — everything else keeps working; you simply lose the live log view.
Screenshot and log retention
| Data | Where | Kept |
|---|---|---|
| Screenshots | Pharmacy PC only | 30 days, pruned when the agent starts or stops |
| Agent log | Pharmacy PC only | Rotated by size (50 MB, a few generations) |
| Live log buffer | Portal, in memory | About 30 minutes |
| Transactions | Portal database | Your account history |
| Report PDFs | Portal | 1 year |
Transactional email — invitations, password resets, alerts, reports — is sent without click or open tracking, so nothing rewrites the links in those messages.
Important: Alert emails carry application names, states, and the agent's own description of a problem. They are written so that document content never appears in them. Forwarding an alert email to Skypond support is safe and is the fastest way to get a problem diagnosed.