WMHMDA Documents: Your Options Compared

1. Hiring a privacy attorney

What you get: documents drafted for your actual business, plus something no generator can offer — advice. An attorney can assess whether an exemption applies to you, review your real data flows against what you think they are, evaluate your litigation exposure, and represent you if something goes wrong.

The trade-off: cost and time. For a pre-revenue app or a single-location studio, commissioning a full document set from scratch can exceed what the business can justify, which is often why these documents simply don't get produced at all.

Choose this if: your data flows are genuinely complex, you sell or share health data at scale, you've received a demand letter or regulator inquiry, or you operate across multiple state and international regimes. In those situations we'd genuinely rather you called a lawyer than bought our pack.

2. General-purpose privacy policy generators

What you get: broad coverage across many privacy frameworks — GDPR, CCPA/CPRA, and increasingly state-specific clauses — usually with cookie banners, consent management and ongoing updates bundled in, on a subscription.

The trade-off: these tools are built around comprehensive privacy laws, and a website privacy policy is their core output. WMHMDA contemplates more than a policy. Before assuming coverage, check whether the output actually includes an unbundled opt-in consent mechanism, a separate written authorization to sell consumer health data, a documented retention and disposal schedule, and a consumer rights request process. Some do address Washington; the point is to verify rather than assume.

Choose this if: you need several privacy regimes handled together on an ongoing basis, and you're happy to pay annually for that breadth.

3. Free templates

What you get: a starting structure, at no cost. There's nothing wrong with this route — we publish a free WMHMDA checklist ourselves, with no email required.

The trade-off: most free templates are general privacy policies, not Washington health-data documents, and adapting one properly means reading RCW 19.373 closely enough to know what's missing. The risk isn't that the template is bad; it's the false sense of completion from publishing a policy that doesn't address consent, sale authorization or retention at all.

Choose this if: your budget is genuinely zero and you have the hours to do the adaptation carefully. Our compliance map is free and will tell you what a template needs to cover.

4. Doing it yourself from the statute

What you get: complete control and the best possible understanding of your own obligations. RCW 19.373 is publicly available and more readable than most legislation.

The trade-off: time, and the difficulty of knowing when you're done. Drafting five interlocking documents from a statute typically takes a non-lawyer several days.

Choose this if: you're comfortable with legislation and value understanding over speed. Start with the compliance map, which lays out the act provision by provision.

5. This WMHMDA Compliance Pack

What you get: five draft documents — consumer health data privacy policy, opt-in consent form, authorization to sell (or a dated "not applicable" record), retention and disposal schedule, and consumer rights request form — generated from a seven-question questionnaire, exportable as PDF and editable Word. One payment of $99.99, no subscription. You read every document in full before paying, which is unusual in this category and deliberate.

The trade-off, stated plainly: it's a document generator, not a law firm. It cannot look at your actual codebase, SDK configuration or vendor contracts. It produces Washington documents only — not Nevada, not Connecticut, not GDPR or CCPA. And the documents are drafts intended for your review; they don't guarantee compliance, because compliance depends on what your business actually does, not on which files you hold.

Choose this if: you need the Washington-specific set quickly, your data practices are straightforward enough to describe in a questionnaire, and a one-time $99.99 fits better than either a subscription or an attorney engagement.

The combination most small businesses actually use

Worth saying explicitly, because it's often the best value: generate a complete first draft, then pay an attorney to review it rather than to write it. Review engagements are typically much cheaper than drafting engagements, and you arrive with specific documents and specific questions instead of a blank page. That path gets you both speed and professional oversight, and we'd recommend it over our pack alone for any business with meaningful revenue at stake.