Terms of Service for HeliosCheck.com

These Terms of Service (the “Terms”) govern your use of the website at helioscheck.com, any subdomain of it, and the consultations, written plans and follow-up messaging supplied through it (together, the “Service”). The Service is operated by [LEGAL ENTITY NAME], a company registered in [COUNTRY OF REGISTRATION] under company number [COMPANY NUMBER], with its registered office at [REGISTERED OFFICE ADDRESS] (“HeliosCheck”, “we”, “us”).

Read these Terms alongside our Privacy Policy, our Medical Disclaimer and our Cookie Policy. Together they form the agreement between us. Where the Medical Disclaimer and these Terms both describe the clinical limits of the Service, they are intended to be read consistently; if they genuinely conflict, the Medical Disclaimer governs the clinical point and these Terms govern the commercial one.

1. Acceptance of these terms

By browsing helioscheck.com, submitting an enquiry, creating an account, completing an intake form or booking a consultation, you confirm that you have read these Terms, that you understand them, and that you agree to be bound by them. If you do not agree, please do not use the Service.

If you are agreeing on behalf of someone else — a dependent adult, a relative you care for, or an organisation — you confirm that you have the authority to do so and that you accept these Terms on their behalf as well as your own.

2. Who may use the service

To book a consultation with HeliosCheck.com you must:

• be at least 18 years old;
• be physically located, at the time of the appointment, in a territory we currently serve — [LIST OF PERMITTED TERRITORIES]. We are not able to consult with patients located elsewhere, because a clinician must be licensed to practise where the patient is;
• have the mental capacity to consent to your own care; and
• give us accurate information about your identity, age and location.

We do not knowingly consult with anyone under 18. Where a young person needs specialist gynecology input, that care should be arranged through their own doctor or a paediatric and adolescent gynecology service. The conditions we cover page is freely readable by anyone, but reading it is not a consultation.

An adult may book on behalf of another adult who lacks capacity, provided the legal authority to do so is disclosed to us before the appointment. Your clinician may decline to proceed where consent, identity or authority cannot be established.

3. What the service is — and what it is not

HeliosCheck.com provides two distinct things:

1. Health information. Articles and condition pages written by our clinicians and checked against published guidance. This is general information for a general audience. It is not advice about you.
2. Paid consultations. A scheduled appointment of 30 to 45 minutes with a named consultant gynecologist by video or telephone, a written plan issued afterwards, and 14 days of follow-up messaging with the same clinician. Our how it works page describes each stage; our services page sets out the scope.

The Service is not emergency care. We do not operate an urgent line, we do not monitor messages overnight, and no part of the Service is capable of responding to a medical emergency. If you have symptoms that may be serious — bleeding heavy enough to soak through a pad or tampon every hour for two hours or more, severe pelvic or abdominal pain, pelvic pain with a fever, faintness or collapse, one-sided pain with bleeding in early pregnancy, or any bleeding after the menopause — contact your local emergency number, attend an emergency department, or in the UK use NHS 111. Do not wait for a reply from us.

The Service does not replace your regular doctor. We do not hold your full medical record, we do not provide continuing general medical care, we do not provide booked maternity care or antenatal scanning, and we do not take over prescribing for unrelated conditions. HeliosCheck.com is designed to sit alongside your usual care as a specialist layer, which is why every written plan contains a section addressed to the clinician who does hold your record.

4. Your account and the information you give us

You are responsible for keeping your account credentials confidential and for everything done through your account. Tell us promptly if you believe someone else has accessed it.

You agree to give complete and accurate information on the intake form and during the consultation, including your medicines, allergies, past reactions, pregnancy status, relevant surgical history and any other clinician currently treating you. Clinical reasoning is only as good as the history it is built on. Where information is withheld, inaccurate or incomplete, the clinical impression and any plan we issue may be wrong, and we are not responsible for that outcome.

What we do with the information you give us — where it is stored, who can see it, how long it is kept and how to obtain a copy — is set out in the Privacy Policy.

5. Booking, fees, cancellation and refunds

Fees and payment

Consultation fees are shown in full before you pay, in the currency stated at checkout, inclusive of any applicable taxes unless stated otherwise. Payment is taken at the point of booking and the slot is not held until payment clears. Payment is processed by [PAYMENT PROCESSOR NAME]; we do not store your full card details. The fee covers the appointment, the written plan and the 14-day follow-up window. Tests, imaging, prescriptions dispensed by a pharmacy, and onward care with any other provider are not included.

Rescheduling and cancellation by you

• More than [48] hours before the appointment: reschedule or cancel for a full refund.
• Between [48] and [24] hours before: reschedule once at no charge, or cancel for a [50]% refund.
• Less than [24] hours before, or non-attendance: no refund, because the clinician’s time has been reserved and the intake has already been reviewed.

Where consumer law in your territory gives you a statutory right to cancel a distance contract, that right applies in addition to the above and is not reduced by it. Because a consultation is a service delivered at a fixed time, you may be asked to acknowledge that performance begins before the statutory cancellation period ends. [Confirm the exact statutory position for each territory with your lawyer.]

Cancellation by us

If we cancel or cannot deliver your appointment — clinician illness, a technical failure on our side, or a clinical decision that the consultation should not proceed remotely — you may choose a full refund or a rescheduled slot at no extra cost. If your clinician concludes within the first [10] minutes that your question cannot safely or usefully be handled online, we will end the appointment, tell you where to go instead, and refund the fee in full.

Late arrival and technical problems

Appointments start and end at the scheduled time. If you join late, the appointment ends as scheduled. If a technical fault prevents the appointment from taking place and the fault is not on your side, we will reschedule at no cost. Refunds are returned to the original payment method within [10] working days.

6. Prescriptions and their limits

A HeliosCheck.com clinician may issue a prescription where it is clinically appropriate, lawful in your territory, and safe to do so without a physical examination. A prescription is never guaranteed by the act of paying for a consultation. You are paying for a specialist opinion, and part of that opinion may be that a medicine is not indicated, not safe for you, or not appropriate to start remotely.

Your clinician will not prescribe:

• controlled drugs, or medicines with a recognised misuse potential;
• treatments that require a baseline physical or internal examination, or monitoring we cannot arrange;
• medicines outside their specialty or outside published guidance without a documented clinical reason; or
• on request alone, where the history does not support the request.

Where a prescription is issued, it is sent to a pharmacy of your choosing or to you in a form your pharmacy accepts. Dispensing, stock and pharmacy charges are matters between you and that pharmacy. Read the patient information leaflet supplied with any medicine, take it as directed, and report side effects to your clinician and to your national medicines regulator. The limits of remote prescribing are described further in the Medical Disclaimer and in our FAQ.

7. The clinician–patient relationship and its scope

A clinician–patient relationship is formed when you attend a paid consultation — not before. Browsing helioscheck.com, reading a condition page, sending a general enquiry or downloading anything from the site does not create one.

That relationship is limited in scope and in time. It covers the question you brought, the plan issued for it, and the 14-day follow-up window for that plan. It is not an ongoing duty of care, it does not make us your treating physician, and it does not create an on-call obligation. Outside the follow-up window, a new episode of care requires a new appointment.

Your clinician may refer you onward, request tests, or decline to advise where the question falls outside their competence or outside what remote care can responsibly cover. Declining is a clinical judgement, not a failure of the Service, and it is one of the reasons the Service is worth using.

8. Intellectual property

All content on helioscheck.com — text, clinical explainers, page structure, photography licences, logos, and the HeliosCheck name and marks — is owned by [LEGAL ENTITY NAME] or licensed to us, and is protected by copyright and trade mark law.

You may read, print and share our pages for your own personal, non-commercial use, and you may link to any page on the site. You may not republish substantial extracts, reproduce our content on another website or in a commercial product, use our content to train a machine-learning model, remove attribution, or use the HeliosCheck name or marks in a way that suggests endorsement or affiliation, without our prior written permission.

The written plan issued after your consultation is yours. You may keep it, copy it and share it with any clinician, insurer or family member you choose.

9. Acceptable use

You agree not to:

• use the Service for any unlawful, fraudulent or harmful purpose;
• impersonate another person, book under a false identity, or misrepresent your age or location;
• record, photograph or broadcast a consultation without your clinician’s prior consent;
• abuse, threaten, harass or discriminate against our clinicians or staff — we will end an appointment immediately, without refund, where this happens;
• attempt to gain unauthorised access to our systems, probe or test their security, or introduce malicious code;
• scrape, crawl or harvest content or personal data from the site by automated means beyond ordinary search-engine indexing; or
• post or transmit content that infringes another person’s rights or that is unlawful.

10. Third-party links and content

We link to external organisations — among them ACOG, the RCOG, NICE, the NHS and the World Health Organization — so that you can check what we say against the source. We do so because traceability is one of our commitments, not because we control those sites.

We are not responsible for the content, availability, accuracy or privacy practices of any third-party site, and a link is not an endorsement of every view expressed there. Third-party guidance is also revised over time; the version you read may be newer than the one we cited. Our editorial policy explains how and when we re-check our sources.

The Service also depends on third-party providers for video, payments, scheduling and messaging. Their terms apply to their part of the Service, and their outages are outside our control.

11. Limitation of liability

Nothing in these Terms excludes or limits our liability for death or personal injury caused by our negligence, for fraud or fraudulent misrepresentation, or for any other liability that cannot lawfully be excluded or limited. If any part of this section is found to be unenforceable, the rest of it continues to apply.

Subject to that paragraph:

• we provide the information pages on helioscheck.com on an “as is” basis, and we do not warrant that they are complete, current in every particular, or applicable to your circumstances;
• we are not liable for any decision you take on the basis of general information you read on the site rather than on personal clinical advice;
• we are not liable for indirect or consequential loss, loss of profit, loss of earnings, loss of anticipated savings, or loss of opportunity; and
• our total aggregate liability arising out of any single episode of care is limited to [the greater of the fees you paid for that episode of care, or the amount recoverable under our professional indemnity insurance in respect of it]. Our clinicians hold professional indemnity cover as required by their regulator [insurer and policy details to be added].

We are not liable for failures caused by events outside our reasonable control, including your own internet connection, power or telecommunications failure, or the failure of a third-party platform.

12. Indemnity

You agree to indemnify us against any claim, loss, damage, cost or reasonable legal expense we suffer that arises from your breach of these Terms, from your misuse of the Service, from information you gave us that was materially false or incomplete, or from your unauthorised use of our content. This does not apply to anything caused by our own negligence or breach.

13. Complaints, and how to escalate them

If something about your care or your experience was not right, we would rather hear it than not. Complaints are read by a person, not a queue.

1. Tell us. Write to hello@helioschecks.com with the word “Complaint” in the subject line, or use the contact page. Include what happened, when, and what outcome you are looking for.
2. Acknowledgement within [3] working days. We confirm receipt and tell you who is handling it.
3. Full response within [20] working days. A clinician not involved in your care reviews any clinical element. If the investigation needs longer, we tell you why and give a new date.
4. Internal escalation. If our response does not resolve matters, ask for review by the [Responsible Officer / Clinical Director], who will reply within a further [15] working days.
5. External escalation. You may take an unresolved complaint to [INDEPENDENT COMPLAINTS BODY / OMBUDSMAN], and a concern about a clinician’s fitness to practise to their professional regulator, [REGULATOR NAME]. Nothing in these Terms restricts your right to do so, and we will not ask you to withdraw a regulatory complaint as a condition of any remedy.

14. Suspension and termination

You may stop using the Service at any time and may ask us to close your account. Closing an account does not delete records we are legally required to retain; retention periods are in the Privacy Policy.

We may suspend or end your access where you breach these Terms, where behaviour towards our staff or clinicians makes the relationship untenable, where we suspect fraud, or where a clinician concludes that remote care is not appropriate for you. Where we end access for a reason that is not your fault, we refund any fee paid for care not yet delivered. Where a clinical hand-over is needed, we will provide a written summary for the clinician taking over.

Sections 8 (intellectual property), 11 (limitation of liability), 12 (indemnity), 15 (governing law) and any other provision intended to survive termination continue to apply after it.

15. Governing law and jurisdiction

These Terms, and any dispute arising out of them or out of the Service, are governed by the law of [GOVERNING LAW — e.g. England and Wales], and the courts of [JURISDICTION] have exclusive jurisdiction. If you are a consumer resident elsewhere, you keep the benefit of any mandatory consumer protections of your country of residence, and you may be entitled to bring proceedings there.

16. Changes to these terms

We may update these Terms as the Service, our clinical governance or the law changes. The version published at helioscheck.com/terms is always the current one, and the date at the top tells you when it last changed. Where a change materially affects your rights, we will give at least [30] days’ notice by email to account holders before it takes effect. The Terms that apply to a consultation are the ones in force on the day you booked it.

17. How to contact us

Questions about these Terms, or about anything in them you would like explained in plain language, go to hello@helioschecks.com or through the contact page. Written correspondence: [LEGAL ENTITY NAME], [REGISTERED OFFICE ADDRESS]. Our data protection contact is named in the Privacy Policy.

Read next: the Medical Disclaimer — the clinical companion to this document — and the how it works page, which describes in practical terms what these Terms describe in legal ones.