This notice explains how we handle your information when you receive support from Adult Social Care and Beam Notes is used in meetings. This Privacy Notice should be read alongside our Adult Social Care Privacy Notice.
What is Beam Notes?
Beam Notes is an IT tool that helps us to take notes and create reports from meetings. We find this tool useful as it allows us to listen and have a conversation with you without having to stop to take lots of notes.
Your involved worker will explain how the tool works and then confirm if you want us to use it. If you would prefer us not to then the worker will take notes themselves to ensure that the meeting is still recorded accurately.
How does it work?
If you are happy for us to use Beam Notes, the worker will start the recording, and it will make an audio recording of the meeting. When the meeting ends, the Beam Notes tool creates a transcription (i.e. turning what was said into text). It then uses AI to produce a summary of what was discussed.
The worker will then copy this summary and create a report of the meeting. The report will use the summary as a starting point and be reviewed and edited by the worker to ensure that it is accurate. The report is then saved as part of your records on our Adult Social Care case management system.
Can other people see my information?
The information recorded will only be seen by professionals involved in providing support to you. Our contract with the company Beam ensures that all information is stored securely, remains confidential and cannot be shared with anyone else.
How AI is used in this process
The AI simply looks at the transcription of the meeting and creates an initial summary of what was discussed. The involved worker will still complete the writing of the report to ensure that it accurately reflects what was discussed.
This tool is not used to make any decisions about you. Its only role is to create an initial summary of the meeting from the transcript.
The AI service that is used by Beam Notes is Azure’s OpenAI model.
The information we hold
The report will be saved as part of your case file on our Adult Social Care Case Management system. The information in your case file will vary depending on the support being provided, but may include the following:
- key identifying details such as Name, Address, Date of Birth, National Insurance Number, NHS Number, Ethnicity and Contact details
- relationships and details of people who are Next of Kin, including those you have asked to act on your behalf
- information recorded as part of your referral to our services
- information recorded in an assessment of your support needs
- relevant Case Information including records of visits or contacts with you made as part of your care
- health Information and information about your Mental Capacity
- details about other agencies involved in supporting you
- financial information and risks
Why we have it and what we use it for
If you are receiving support from Adult Social Care, we will need to process your information to meet our statutory duties to you as outlined in the Care Act 2014 and the Mental Capacity Act 2005. For Data Protection purposes, this means we collect and use your personal information under the 'public task' lawful basis.
We collect only the information that we need to carry out these functions, and we ensure that it is used and stored safely and securely.
All staff who have access to information about you will have received training on data protection and information security and they work to a code of conduct which requires them to respect the confidentiality of the information about you that they have access to in order to do their jobs.
How long we keep information for
Beam Notes are deleted every 90 days. Cambridgeshire County Council only keep information for as long as it is needed. This will be based on either a legal requirement (where a law says we must keep information for a specific period of time) or accepted business practice. We hold records for 7 years after we have ceased to work with you.
Your rights
Under Data Protection Legislation you have the following rights:
- Right of access (to receive a copy of your personal data)
- Right to rectification (to request data is corrected inaccurate)
- Right to erasure (to request that data is deleted)
- Right to restrict processing (to request we don’t use your data in a certain way)
- Right to data portability (in some cases, you can ask to receive a copy of your data in a commonly-used electronic format so that it can be given to someone else)
- Right to object (generally to make a complaint about any aspect of our use of your data)
- Right to have explained if there will be any automated decision-making, including profiling, based on your data and for the logic behind this to be explained to you
Any request can be submitted to the Data Protection Officer. Whether we can agree to your request will depend on the specific circumstances and if we cannot then we will explain the reasons why.
If you are unhappy with any aspect of how your information has been collected and/or used, you can make a complaint to the Data Protection Officer.
Contact our Data Protection Officer
Email: Data.protection@cambridgeshire.gov.uk
Data Protection Officer.
Cambridgeshire County Council
Box No. SCO2306
Scott House
5 George Street
Huntingdon
PE29 3AD
Contact the Information Commissioner Office
You can also report your concerns to the Information Commissioner’s Office.
