After hospitals, patients get a turn to bring AI into the doctor’s office

STAT News – Thursday, June 4, 2026
By Health Tech Correspondent

Patients are getting used to being recorded in the doctor’s office. More than a quarter of U.S. practices now use AI-based listening tools called ambient scribes, which capture visits in real time and draft clinical notes for clinicians to enter into patients’ medical records.

But what happens when it’s the patient doing the recording?

Nearly every patient now has a recording device in their pocket, and commercial large language models have made it easier than ever for them to transcribe and interpret audio files. A growing number of consumer apps — with names like VisitRecall, Advoca Health, and AlignCare — are using AI to do just that, delivering summaries and action items for patients after the fact. One called Kin Health, with backing from the co-founder of GoodRx, announced a $9 million seed round in May.

In their most vulnerable moments, patient-app developers say, people can use the extra help to remember everything their doctor says. They see value in providing a single place where a patient can track all their encounters across health systems, sometimes for free and sometimes for a monthly fee. Beyond summarization, AI could make it easier to follow up on important instructions and share them with their family and caregiving team.

“It’s more about the stitching together than it is about the content itself,” said Kin CEO and co-founder Arpan Parikh.

But the tools also introduce challenging questions for patients about the privacy and security of health data when it’s stored and processed outside a provider’s digital walls. And patients using their own AI tools could lead to tensions in the doctor’s office, as those tools create an alternate record of what happened in a visit.

For many developers, the case for patient recordings starts with their own caregiving experiences. Wes Donohoe, who built VisitRecall, described the moment his son had a concussion while they were skiing in Vermont and had to go to the hospital, where he recorded his visit.

“Before I even leave the room, I summarized it and shared it with my wife,” Donohoe said. “Now, she knows what’s happening. She knows what we need to do next.” Several apps have built features to facilitate data sharing with caregivers.

They also share reminders, like to follow up on a referral or fill medications that a doctor mentions. Say you see a cardiologist, and the app hears them prescribe you Repatha, “which is super expensive,” Parikh said. With Kin’s GoodRx integration, the app can prompt the patient to sign up for a copay coupon.

The tools also give patients a convenient place to store notes from all their visits, no matter where they happened. But health tech built for patients often introduces a catch-22: The more patients are in control of their health data, the fewer protections they have.

“Some of the best tools or great experiences can have the worst fine print,” said Andrea Downing, a security researcher and founder of The Light Collective, a nonprofit that advocates for stronger health data protections for patients.

Health information collected by a doctor’s office falls under the privacy law known as HIPAA. But when outside those offices — whether a patient requests their own records or inputs their data into a consumer app — those rules no longer apply.

“That is kind of concerning, because this is very sensitive information,” said Sara Gerke, a professor at the University of Illinois College of Law. Health systems often implement policies that quickly delete the raw audio and transcripts collected by their ambient scribes. What happens to that data on the patient side? “At the end of the day, that depends on these user agreements,” Gerke said. There also must be considerations for state-specific data and health-data privacy protections.

Some patient apps claim to treat health data as if it were regulated by HIPAA to keep it private and secure — some because they say it’s the right thing to do, others because they see a world in which they could start working directly with health systems and want to be HIPAA-ready. Some don’t store recordings or transcripts, or delete them after a certain period of time, similar to health systems that use ambient scribes.

But privacy experts remind patients that consumer products can change their terms of use and privacy policies whenever they want, without negotiation. And that fine print varies widely between apps.

“Are they going to share the data? In which format? Are they sharing de-identified information, or even — hopefully not — the individually identifiable information?” Gerke said. Then there’s the question of how the data can be used: for research, commercial development, or ad targeting.

In particular, Downing cautions patients to look for policies that allow targeted advertising using tracking technologies and third-party ad networks. “That is usually the first thing I look at in a privacy policy, and if it’s there, I personally won’t use it,” she said. As with most consumer-facing tech, the old adage remains true: If the product is free, you’re probably the product.

“To me as a patient or as a consumer, sometimes I’m OK with that balance,” said Raj Patel, vice president of digital patient experience at Mass General Brigham, referring to when a tool provides enough value to an individual or the medical community. “That’s a choice we make. I think that’s OK, as long as it’s super, super explicit.”

Patients are also on the hook when it comes to judging the accuracy of AI tools they bring into the office.

“AI obviously is not perfect, right? There’s a risk of errors and mistakes,” said Franklyn Nnakwue, who built the app AlignCare. Large language models can still hallucinate and leave important things out, whether they’re being used to generate notes for doctors or patients. To mitigate some of the risks, Michael Trueman, a former National Health Service doctor who developed an app called Advoca, doesn’t include medication dosage information in the app’s summaries.

But developers say it’s important to compare tools’ performance to the alternative: Are they more accurate than a patient who has forgotten part of what they heard, or a caregiver who’s out of the loop? “The AI that was with you during the visit will be much more accurate than a caregiver that’s just reading the notes without context,” Nnakwue said.

Inside a health system, these complex security and performance questions would be carefully dissected by a team of information technology and cybersecurity experts. Inside your phone, it’s all up to you.

Why some hospitals might forbid patient recording

Adoption of patient recording apps is still low, with app download numbers often in the single-digit thousands. But some providers are expecting patient recording to grow as they embrace their doctors’ ambient scribes as a normal part of health care.

Before the explosion of ambient scribes, patients “might’ve thought it was rude to ask” their doctor to record a visit, said Karandeep Singh, chief AI officer at UCSD Health. “Now it’s like, well, I’m signing something that’s saying you can record me, so I should feel empowered to ask. That’s why we’re seeing that issue forced.”

The paired adoption of ambient scribes and patient-facing tools could introduce tension over who gets to record, and how.

Recently, patients have sued health systems in California for allegedly failing to obtain informed consent before they use Abridge’s ambient scribe. (That company, which isn’t listed as a defendant in those suits, actually started as a patient-facing tool.) And patient-app developers say health systems have pushed back on allowing patients to access the full recordings or transcripts of their visits. Some health systems even have policies that outright forbid the recording of visits by patients, Singh said.

“My expectation is that hospitals and physicians will not be happy about those tools being commercially used,” Gerke said. Health systems could be worried that patients’ recordings could be a liability, serving as evidence for potential malpractice claims. Or they could be wary of the imbalance in cybersecurity protections for the same raw data being processed on each side of a visit.

“Health systems are a little bit in a bind,” said Singh, because they don’t have visibility into the security of patient tools that could be brought into the clinic. “To be able to say if patients can use it, I think, is in some sense accepting risk as a result of that private conversation being made public.”

Providers also expressed concern about the impact on patients when two AI systems interpret the same visit. Patients already have access to the clinical notes from their medical encounter — often generated by an ambient scribe and OK’d by a doctor. Health systems also often share a summary of the visit explicitly tailored for the patient.

“If there’s another source of information that’s thrown into the mix, is it concordant with the content or the tone or the direction or the nuance of the messaging that might have come from the clinician in the visit?” said Srinath Adusumalli, chief health information officer at the University of Pennsylvania Health System. “I worry a bit that if there’s any distance between the two on the patient and the clinician side of tools, that just leads to more confusion.” Both Patel and Adusumalli said evidence was likely needed to understand how patient-facing tools perform.

Because of those issues, some patient apps don’t allow users to access the full recording of their visit, and make clear that the hospital’s electronic health record is always the final source of information for a patient. Kin doesn’t allow patients to see their full recordings or transcripts — only the AI-generated summaries and follow-up information. “This approach does mitigate and reduce the concern, in a rightful way, from the health care system,” Parikh said. “So this gives us a much better shot at adoption and being rolled out by practices, which is working.”

Restricting patient access to the raw data can present its own issues, others said: “Our standpoint is that it’s a safety feature,” said Advoca’s Trueman. If something seems off in the app’s output, “it means that patients have then got something to check against.”

Technology advocates on both sides of the fence would like to see cultural and legal standards allow for patients and clinicians to benefit from accurate recording and summarization tools.

“The right thing to do is to let patients have the same rights that we do with respect to that conversation, which is really a two-way conversation between a patient and their clinician,” Singh said. “Ideally, when we start an encounter, we’d have a moment where we can exchange consent: Is it OK if I record you?”

In the meantime, most developers encourage patients to always ask their doctor if they can use their apps, even in the majority of states with laws that require only one party to consent to a recording. But several suggested that patients tweak their language to make it an easier pill for doctors to swallow. Ask to use a “note-taker,” they said — not to record.

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