Terms of Service & Clinical Disclaimer
Clinical Decision Support (CDS) Operating Agreement • Last Updated: October 2026
Clinical Decision Support (CDS) Notice
The web applications, algorithmic frameworks, calculators, and clinical guides hosted on ballamed.com and its subdomains are intended strictly for use by licensed physicians, resident trainees, medical students, and allied healthcare professionals. These tools are educational and decision-assist references designed to synthesize published evidence; they are not a substitute for independent, individualized clinical evaluation.
1. No Medical Advice or Doctor-Patient Relationship
The interactive calculators, clinical scores (including RCRI, PREVENT™, GINA step ladders, WHO/CDC percentiles, and ACR criteria), staging engines, and medication holding protocols provided across this platform reflect published, peer-reviewed medical consensus and professional guidelines (e.g., ACC/AHA, ACOG, CDC, GINA, ACR, Princeton IV).
Accessing, reviewing, or running data through these applications does not constitute formal medical advice, definitive diagnostic declarations, or the creation of a physician-patient relationship between Justin Balla, MD, ballamed, and any individual or patient.
2. Professional Discretion & Sole Clinician Responsibility
Medicine is an evolving, patient-specific discipline. Unique patient variables—including atypical pharmacokinetics, extreme comorbidities, polypharmacy, nuanced anatomical considerations, laboratory variations, and local hospital formularies—must always supersede automated algorithms.
The treating clinician retains absolute autonomy and assumes sole, undelegated professional and legal responsibility for all clinical orders, therapeutic decisions, risk stratifications, medication adjustments, and patient management.
3. Rejection of Blanket “Clearance” Terminology
In accordance with modern American College of Cardiology (ACC), American College of Physicians (ACP), and American Society of Anesthesiologists (ASA) guidelines, tools within this platform deliberately reject the outdated and legally ambiguous term “clearance” (e.g., “surgical clearance”). Practitioners must provide nuanced physiological risk stratification and comorbidity optimization rather than binary authorization.
4. Data Privacy, Ephemeral Processing & HIPAA Compliance
These tools operate strictly on a client-side or ephemeral processing model. No Protected Health Information (PHI) is ever collected, stored, tracked, or transmitted to persistent external databases. Users must never input direct patient identifiers (such as patient names, Social Security numbers, medical record numbers, or dates of birth) into any calculator or note generator.
5. Intellectual Property & Permitted Use
The user interfaces, custom visual assets, codebases, and curated clinical logic architectures across ballamed.com are proprietary intellectual property. These applications are made openly accessible for point-of-care clinical use, non-commercial education, and self-study. Automated scraping, commercial redistribution, uncredited mirroring, or reverse engineering of application codebases without explicit written authorization is strictly prohibited.
6. Limitation of Liability
While every effort is made to maintain fidelity to current clinical practice guidelines, all software, calculators, and informational assets are provided strictly on an “AS-IS” and “AS-AVAILABLE” basis without warranties of any kind, whether express or implied.
Under no circumstances shall Justin Balla, MD, ballamed, or affiliated developers and contributors be held liable for any direct, indirect, incidental, consequential, punitive, or special damages, claims, adverse patient events, medical errors, malpractice actions, or operational losses arising out of or in connection with the access, use, interpretation, or implementation of data provided by this website and its affiliated applications.