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Audience: DPO / Compliance

Roles and permissions in the practice

Thirteen roles, over a hundred permissions and two different ways of granting them — and why the four roles from the previous version of this page do not exist.

Last reviewed:

A role is assigned within a specific practice, not to an account. The same person can be an owner in one practice and a trainee in another. The active practice is named on every request, and membership in it is checked before any data is released.

Thirteen roles

The names visible in the app — in the Role field on an invitation and when changing a role:

Staff: Owner · Administrator · Practitioner · Assistant · Patient

Hospital and multidisciplinary team roles: Coordinator · Senior therapist · Technician · Trainee · Clinical (read-only) · Occupational therapist · Speech therapist · Psychologist

For several of them the app spells out what the role does:

  • Coordinator — department head; manages structure and teams, may countersign notes.
  • Senior therapist — supervising therapist; countersigns notes, plans treatment series.
  • Technician — executes ordered procedures; cannot create or sign orders.
  • Trainee — documents care; notes require a countersignature before finalisation.
  • Clinical (read-only) — reads, changes nothing.
  • Occupational therapist, Speech therapist, Psychologist — document their own clinical work, with no administration.

Two ways of granting permissions

The distinction matters in an audit, because two roles with similar-sounding names can have entirely different scope.

A ladder. The five staff roles form an ordered chain: Owner subsumes Administrator, who subsumes Practitioner, who subsumes Assistant. A permission granted lower down is automatically available higher up.

Exact membership. The eight hospital roles are not a superset of any other. A role gets a permission only when it is written explicitly onto that permission's list. This was deliberate: "Clinical (read-only)" has to see a great deal and be unable to change anything — a ladder cannot express that without leaking permissions.

One hundred and two permissions

The permissions are fine-grained so that they can be granted separately. A few examples showing how fine:

  • checking a patient out at the front desk and marking a no-show are separate permissions from editing an appointment — reception does one without the other,
  • bulk no-show marking was deliberately left with appointment editing; a bulk action is a heavier decision than a single button on a row,
  • issuing, cancelling and correcting an invoice are three different permissions,
  • signing a note, countersigning it and amending it are three different permissions.

The full matrix is maintained in code and guarded by a test comparing it against a recorded baseline — adding a new role cannot quietly change the scope of any existing one.

When something does not work

Warning

Cannot demote the last owner.

What this means: An attempt to change the role of the only person holding owner permissions.

What to do: Give someone else the owner role first, then make the change.
Warning

You need owner or admin permissions to access GDPR settings. Contact your clinic administrator.

What this means: The GDPR settings are available only to the two highest roles.

What to do: Ask for a temporary role change, or for the task to be done by someone who holds the permission.
Info

This person is already a member of the clinic.

What this means: The invitation is going to an address that already holds a membership in this practice.

What to do: Change the role on the existing membership instead of inviting again.

Access by Heltio staff

Heltio has its own administrative accounts — with roles matching support, administration and engineering work. They are used for handling tickets, verifying practices and diagnosing failures, and their actions leave a trace in a separate register.

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