Helose vs. Spruce Health

Company overview

Spruce gives a small clinical team one HIPAA-covered place for phone, text, and fax, and it is unusually candid in public about what plain SMS does and does not protect. It is a solid, well-run inbox. The difference is what you are buying: Spruce is priced per staff seat for the people working the queue, and Helose is priced per patient for the weeks when nobody is in a queue at all.

Who each is built for

Spruce Health

• Small clinical teams that want phone, text, and fax in one HIPAA-covered inbox
• Priced per staff seat, so the bill tracks how many people work the queue
• Publishes clear, honest guidance about the limits of plain SMS

Helose

• Small to mid-sized clinics that want premium patient contact
• Priced per patient we actually text, so the bill tracks patients and not headcount
• Built for the stretch between appointments rather than the live queue

What patients get

• Clinic branded contact card (your name and logo in the thread, not a rented short code)
• Blue bubbles on iPhone, SMS everywhere else. No app or new account
• Short Habit check-ins answerable from the lock screen
• Reorder link in the same conversation when supply runs low. Your clinic fulfills and collects payment
• White-labeled to your subdomain

What staff get

• See how patients are doing while Habit runs
• Choose your Habit texts once. Helose sends them on your schedule
• Not an EHR. Nothing to migrate and no chart to maintain
• Pay only for patients actually texted

When carrier filtering eats a check-in

• Texts to a regular US phone number can get filtered by carriers. The clinic often never hears that the check-in missed.
• Health-related wording draws extra scrutiny, so legitimate clinic messages get caught in it.
• Blue-bubble iMessage does not ride those SMS filters.
• If the phone is not on iMessage, messages from the same clinic branded contact card still send as a regular text.

The bottom line