A New Kind of Medical Appointment Summary App
Ditto is a medical appointment summary app that records doctor-patient conversations, turns them into plain-language notes, and lets users replay, review, and share what was said to improve memory, understanding, and trust. The idea starts from a well-known problem: patients forget most of what they hear in the exam room. Research shows people retain less than 25% of information from a medical consultation, a gap that widens with anxiety, complex diagnoses, and unfamiliar jargon. Ditto’s co-founder Bart Voorn experienced this when he was diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes and left the hospital overwhelmed, with crucial details slipping away before he got home. By turning each visit into a clear doctor conversation recording and summary, Ditto aims to close this comprehension gap and make medical advice something patients can reliably revisit instead of guess at later.
How Ditto Captures Doctor Conversations and Fills Memory Gaps
Ditto works as a patient communication tool that focuses on the consultation itself, not on booking or billing. Users record their visit—where such recording is allowed—and the app produces a summarized version in everyday language. It currently supports Dutch, English, Arabic, and Turkish, making complex explanations more accessible to different communities. Users can also upload medical letters and documents so the same system can explain specialist notes that are often written for clinicians, not patients. Co-founder Tobias Polak saw how two people leaving the same cancer consultation could recall entirely different stories, so Ditto is designed to make those key moments searchable and replayable. Instead of relying on memory, a patient can re-listen to the doctor conversation recording or review the written summary when deciding on treatment, filling prescriptions, or explaining the plan to family.
Building Healthcare App Trust Through Verifiable Records
Many healthcare apps promise smarter care, but trust issues arise when patients cannot verify where information came from or how it was interpreted. Ditto tackles this by anchoring every medical appointment summary in the underlying audio. Users can always replay the exact discussion, making the app’s interpretation transparent. According to Ditto, if it cannot guarantee that a summary is clear and correct, it does not send it; instead, users can listen back to the recording or request help from one of the doctors employed by the company to manually review the transcript. The app uses AI models focused on medical language and runs them on European infrastructure, with processing designed to stay on the device whenever possible. By treating the recording as the primary source and the summary as an aid, Ditto reshapes healthcare app trust around traceable, verifiable conversation records rather than opaque algorithms.
Keeping Families in the Loop and Supporting Better Adherence
Beyond recall, Ditto is built around the reality that serious diagnoses affect families as much as patients. Users can create groups to share summaries with partners, relatives, or close friends, turning each medical appointment summary app session into a shared record of care. Co-founder Merlijn van Breugel was inspired by the burden of phoning many relatives after each cancer consultation with his grandmother. Within Ditto, a single summary can update everyone at once, and those supporters can replay the doctor conversation recording to hear tone and nuance. Voorn’s own diabetes care shows the effect: a colleague spotted a detail about coffee in his consultation summary and helped him align his daily habits with medical advice. Ditto argues that better understanding leads to fewer call-backs, stronger therapy adherence, and more consistent medication use, because everyone around the patient is reading from the same script.
From Scheduling Tools to Communication Clarity Platforms
Most patient communication tools today sit at the edges of care: portals for lab results, apps for scheduling, reminders for refills. Ditto positions itself as a different category—an app that focuses squarely on the conversation, using doctor-patient dialogue as the core data. The company is free to download on major app stores and is experimenting with business models, including partnerships with insurers who see value in patients leaving visits with a firm grasp of their care plan. The founders want to keep the app patient-first, even as hospitals ask for integration with their digital portals, which can be time-consuming for a young startup. Their long-term vision is a patient empowerment app that can guide people through their entire healthcare journey, anchored in clear language, strong privacy principles, and the simple idea that better care starts when patients finally understand what was said in the room.
