AARP Hearing Center
Forgot What the Doctor Said? Your Phone Can Help
Many of us forget key details after a doctor’s visit. Recording the conversation may help, but permission comes first
8-minute read
If you’ve ever left the doctor’s office wishing you’d taken better notes, a recording may help, provided your health care provider agrees.
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Key takeaways
- Recordings can help patients revisit complex medical discussions and share accurate information with their caregivers.
- Ask your health care provider for permission before recording, even in areas practicing one-party consent laws.
- AI apps may add or omit information about a visit, so check their output against what the doctor said.
- Consider an app’s privacy and security practices before using it to capture sensitive health information.
Got a tech query? AARP members and readers are invited to send me their questions about devices, online safety, social media and navigating today’s technology.
My doctor asked if he could record our visit for his notes. Should I start recording appointments too? If so, how should I go about it, and what are the benefits for patients?
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The “should I” part of your question boils down to this: Patients often retain only a fraction of what was told to them during a doctor visit. And they may not fully understand what they do recollect.
The “how to go about it” part can be as simple as using the built-in voice recorder on your smartphone, or a specialized app that leans on artificial intelligence to summarize health care provider sessions.
Doctors themselves are using so-called “ambient AI scribes” to record patient visits and generate clinical notes. It reduces their paperwork and, in theory, frees up their time.
Patients could also benefit. “I think the question isn’t really should you record or should you not record [your doctor],” says Dr. Karandeep Singh, chief health AI officer at UC San Diego Health. “[It’s] do you need to take notes about what’s going on with your doctor, and who else needs to know information about your health?” For many older people, family members and caregivers are the ones who need to know.
When a great deal of information is shared during a doctor visit, Singh adds, “that’s one of the biggest sources of anxiety for people.”
First, ask permission
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The people I interviewed for this column said that ethically, the proper course is to ask for permission before recording health care providers, even though most (though not all) states require one-party consent to record another individual. That one party could be you as the person hitting “record,” even without the physician knowing.
Explain that you’re doing it to take notes. “If it were put in the way that ‘this is just a visit for our discussion and would be really helpful if we recorded this,’ I think that’s fine,” says Dr. Stephen B. Schloss, chief of urology at Emerson Hospital in Concord, Massachusetts.
Doctors who are tentative about saying yes may be concerned for legal reasons, fearing that something they utter could be used against them in a court case brought by a litigious individual. On the other hand, a recording could provide evidence that works in the doctor’s favor.
The benefits of recording for patients
There’s no guidance yet in the American Medical Association’s (AMA) code of ethics regarding patients who want to record their doctor visits. The AMA expects to issue a report with recommendations, possibly as soon as November.
For 11 years, Paul J. Barr, a professor at the Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy and Clinical Practice and founder of the Open Recordings group of researchers, clinicians, patients and doctors, has evaluated the benefits of recording routine health care visits and sharing them with patients and loved ones. Some funding comes from the National Institutes of Health and the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute and has supported large clinical and pilot trials and projects across the country, mostly involving adults over 65 with two or more chronic conditions. “Sharing recordings with patients is incredibly helpful,” Barr says, though he adds that not every single visit needs to be recorded. “If you’re in to see your doctor and you have a cold … patients aren’t going to listen back to that.”
What people will review, he says, are “those complex conversations where you’re discussing your hypertension, your diabetes, the new diagnosis you just got and what the plan is to go forward.”
According to Barr, studies suggest that patients forget up to 80 percent of what was discussed with their doctor after leaving the office. Nor do they always accurately remember what they did retain. The same goes for care partners who accompany patients on such visits.
Patients are sometimes motivated to listen to a recording to see if they forgot something they’d wanted to ask or follow up on. Barr says they also want to determine if they consider themselves “good patients.”
Caregivers also benefit from listening to recordings, in case there’s something they hadn’t heard before. “Often, it’s ‘I didn’t realize they had it so bad, because they don’t share it all with me,’” Barr says. Early data also suggests that patients with access to their recordings may experience reduced anxiety and improved mental well-being, though Barr is not ready to draw a firm conclusion.
Barr also noted that patients who listen to their recordings may be less likely to call their health care clinics or doctors’ offices for post-appointment clarifications.
AI apps can provide helpful summaries
While you can always use the recorder app on your phone, AI-backed apps often generate useful summaries of doctor visits that provide more context. I took a look at three: Kin, Medcorder and Patiently: Doctor Visit Notes.
The free Kin app, codeveloped by psychiatrist and CEO Arpan Parikh, prepares a fifth-grade-level summary of a visit within a minute or two.
Under the “What’s going on” section in Kin’s summary, a patient may see lines such as “Possible intermittent expiratory wheezing reported, but lungs are clear on exam” or “No improvement with Flonase, Zyrtec, guaifenesin and dextromethorphan.” In the “What we’re doing” section, a line might include an instruction such as “Use the inhaler twice a day for one to two weeks.” If the patient asks the app about a term they don’t understand, the app will offer a simplified explanation.
Kin creates a summary, rather than sharing the raw audio recordings or unedited transcripts, which Parikh believes doesn’t help patients. “The patient rarely, if ever, actually needs the audio,” he says, adding that the lack of a full recording may also alleviate any anxieties a doctor may have.
Medcorder, another free app, does share the full, unedited audio with patients, who can then share the recording with caregivers and loved ones in a secure chat room created for each medical appointment. Medcorder also creates annotated AI summaries.
Founder and CEO David Weekly developed Medcorder after his own family experienced a series of medical complications. “Patients are trying to figure out what kind of cancer they have, what the different treatment options are and the pros and cons. Often they have to make decisions right away.… And they’re trying to do that in consultation with their family members, most of whom weren’t in the room with the oncologist to hear what was shared there. Hugely stressful.”
Weekly acknowledges the classic advice to always bring someone with you to your appointment. “But even [that person] is not going to be able to follow everything that’s happened as it’s unfolding, especially if they’re emotionally invested,” he says.
“Ultimately, what your doctor says is the authoritative thing,” says Weekly. “We are not an AI doctor.”
Patiently: Doctor Visit Notes is an app that lets you record your medical appointments and uses AI to summarize them. It is currently free during a beta period.
Use AI with caution
If you rely on any AI-generated summary for health advice, you cannot always assume what the AI is spitting out is accurate, no matter how authoritative it sounds. It’s what the tech industry refers to as “hallucinations.”
“AI can make two types of errors when it’s summarizing,” Singh says. “It can add things in that weren’t said; it can omit things that were said. And both of those can be problematic.”
Harvard Medical School professor Catherine M. DesRoches, director of OpenNotes Labs at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, agrees. “We want to go in with eyes open when we use these tools. If it doesn’t seem right, it’s probably not right.” Double-check what you’re hearing if it doesn’t match your recollection.
Meanwhile, Singh believes an AI summary can be a helpful starting point. Without a recording or summary to reference, a patient or caregiver might misunderstand what the doctor said, or forget it entirely: “Even without AI, we suffer from those same issues cognitively,” he says. Most AI tools that summarize transcripts include citations, which Singh says are also useful.
Relieving the stress
Privacy and security must also be emphasized. “On the patient side, whatever tool you are using, just know what the company is doing with your data and how long are they retaining it for, and how long do you need it,” Singh says. Read privacy policies and examine whether your health information may be shared or sold and under what circumstances. What’s more, if a patient is sharing or learning about something that is particularly traumatic or difficult, there could be some risk associated with reliving that experience.
“In a visit where we are hearing something stressful, or we’re very anxious or hearing bad news, we remember even less,” DesRoches says. “So, going back, when your central nervous system has calmed down and you’ve had a little bit of time to sit with the news, listening can be really useful.”
The key takeaways were created with the assistance of generative AI. An AARP editor reviewed and refined the content for accuracy and clarity.
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