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Comment by maxwell | Hacker News Reader

How does she disclose that to her patients? How many refuse?

Her legal team said they are allowed to get verbal consent. She has a sentence she says verbatim something along the lines of “ I am going to use this computer to record this visit and take notes. Is that OK?”

Almost no one refuses.

If I heard that, I would think the person asking is going to take the notes, not feed the recording into a LLM.

I do NOT want a transcription ERROR in my medical records.

I bet if she says something like "AI will transcribe" then there will be more hesitation, although maybe not more refusals because most people don't know how it can make mistakes.

Anecdotally, she has reported it’s _much_ better than her human scribes. And she is still ultimately responsible for the content and reads it all before signing the note.

Are audio recordings of patients shared with third parties?

I believe so, yes. This is nothing new however as "tele scribe" companies have existed for a long time. These sort of cases are exactly what HIPAA regulations were designed to enable.

That sounds like the old trick of pulling out a pen and paper and saying "I'm going to record this, okay?" with a tape recorder in your briefcase.

Are they informed that their personal medical information will be shared with an unknown set of third parties / LLMs subject to manual QA / cloud services with telemetry?

Honestly sounds like she's opening herself up to massive lawsuits (depending on State law). I would reach out to the legal department if any doctor pulled this kind of shit on me.

If you think the clinic's lawyers haven't already reviewed this setup with a fine tooth comb then you haven't seen how medical lawyers work. This isn't a rogue PCP surreptitiously recording visits. Its a contractor that was selected and negotiated with from on high that was subsequently deployed to all clinics in her large company.

Also, I guarantee you signed a paper when you first were enrolled with your PCP giving them permission to share your medical records with third parties when needed (subject to HIPAA compliance of course).

I'm sure they have.

I don't have a PCP.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/daveywinder/2025/02/02/medical-...

https://www.gartner.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2025-02-1...

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/investigations/2024/04/0...

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