What Ditto Is and the Problem It Tries to Solve
Ditto is a doctor conversation app that records medical appointments, transcribes them, and creates a plain-language medical appointment summary so patients can review, understand, and share what was said after they leave the consultation. The app targets a familiar problem: most people walk out of a clinic visit and find their memory full of gaps. Research cited by the company shows patients retain less than 25% of what is said during a medical consultation, even before anxiety, jargon, and complex diagnoses are taken into account. For co-founder Bart Voorn, who lives with Type 1 diabetes, this issue is personal: after his diagnosis, he left hospital with handwritten notes and a quick lesson, only to face a dangerous blood sugar crash that same evening. Ditto is built to prevent such situations by giving patients a reliable record of their care.
How the App Turns Doctor Conversations Into Clear Instructions
Ditto’s core function is simple: during an appointment, patients record the conversation through the app; after the visit, Ditto processes the audio and produces a structured medical appointment summary in straightforward language. The app currently supports Dutch, English, Arabic, and Turkish, reflecting a focus on accessibility for different patient groups. Patients can replay the full recording, read the written summary, and upload related documents such as specialist letters to decode their contents. By acting as a personal patient communication tool, Ditto helps people revisit dosage instructions, lifestyle advice, and next steps when the stress of the visit has passed. The design principle is ease of use: co-founder Bart Voorn notes that his 81‑year‑old father needs to be able to use the interface, so features are kept simple while still handling medical terminology and complex care plans in the background.
From Forgetting to Verifying: Trust and Recall in Healthcare Apps
Ditto addresses two linked gaps: recall and trust. On recall, the app gives patients a permanent record of what the doctor said, not what they think they heard. That alone can reduce confusion when treatment plans are dense or emotionally charged. On trust, Ditto offers a verifiable trail: patients can return to the original recording whenever a summary feels unclear or incomplete. This matters in a market where many patient communication tools promise help but give little transparency on how information is handled. Ditto’s founders, who have backgrounds in privacy software, say their AI models run on European infrastructure and process information without sharing it externally. A quality-control pipeline checks each summary; if clarity and correctness cannot be guaranteed, the user receives only the audio and can request help from a doctor employed by Ditto, who then manually prepares a new summary.
Sharing Care: Involving Families and Building a Patient-First Record
Beyond transcription, Ditto is designed to make healthcare less isolating by helping patients share information with the people who support them. Within the app, users can create groups that include family members and close friends, then share each medical appointment summary and related documents. Co-founder Merlijn van Breugel’s experience of calling many relatives after each cancer appointment with his grandmother helped shape this feature. The result is a shared source of truth: everyone involved can see what the doctor said, rather than relying on second-hand accounts. Voorn experienced the benefit himself when a co-founder spotted that his coffee habit clashed with his doctor’s advice, based on a Ditto summary. Over time, repeated consultations build a private history of care that stays tied to the patient rather than any single clinic, an emerging pattern in patient empowerment tools.
A New Category of Patient Empowerment Apps
With more than 100,000 downloads and thousands of regular users, Ditto is emerging as part of a new category of healthcare apps that focus on documentation as a path to empowerment. Instead of replacing clinicians or existing portals, the app sits alongside them, giving patients a personal record they control. Insurers and doctors see potential benefits: when people understand their care plans, they tend to make fewer follow-up calls and stick to medications and therapies more consistently. Ditto is free to download on major app stores, and the team is working with insurers on reimbursement, while exploring expansion into other healthcare systems. The company’s stated ambition is to become a go-to patient portal built around conversations, not forms. In an ecosystem of fragmented hospital software, Ditto’s approach reflects growing demand for healthcare app trust and tools that are patient-first by design.
