Kin Health raises $9 million to create an AI-powered note-taking device for patients

The market for AI-based note-taking devices has seen significant expansion in the United States, with the category generating more than $600 million in revenue last year, according to a Menlo Ventures report. As startups like Heidi Health and Freed have shown, there is good demand for this technology in the healthcare space, as doctors and clinics see the potential of an AI assistant that can help them track patient conversations, view health records, and reduce their administrative burdens.

But these apps don’t do much for patients, which is why Kin Health is building a blogging device that can record your visits to doctors, analyze medical advice, and show you next steps when needed. To that end, the startup has raised $9 million in a seed funding round led by Maveron.

The app is like a meeting journaling tool: you can log doctor visits, and it will return an AI summary of the meeting, with next steps, all of which you can share with family and friends if you wish. It also allows you to write down questions you might want to ask during your next visit.

Kin Health says it encrypts all patient data, and summaries are kept private by default. The company said the tool is not HIPAA certified because it is a patient-facing tool, but it adheres to the same privacy standards.

The free app was created by doctors Arpan and Amit Parikh, along with Kyle Alwyn, who previously created online prescription service HeyDoctor and sold it to health platform GoodRx. Doug Hirsch and Trevor Bezdek, co-founders of GoodRx, are co-founders and CEOs of the company.

“We have a lot of these storage tanks where our health data can live, but we don’t have a way to turn that into a tool that we can use to drive our behavioral change. Our goal is to create this health graph where we can store your information from multiple different sources,” Alwyn told TechCrunch over a phone call.

Kin Health says its summaries are submitted after a few stages of processing. After transcribing the visit, the algorithm converts the transcription into a clinical narrative, which is converted into a summary that confronts the user with the action items. The company says it relies on specialized medical models to run the transcription, and that it evaluates and monitors the results at different stages to ensure the answers are accurate.

But artificial intelligence in healthcare is received with a degree of caution and apprehension. Privacy experts and researchers have raised concerns about data security, the accuracy of AI, consent mechanisms, the quality of the feedback generated, and its effectiveness.

Note takers using AI often fail to recognize regional dialects and struggle to transcribe them. Kin Health says it’s working to make sure its tool works in different dialects, as well as when someone has a sore throat or is wearing a mask.

It’s important for doctors to review any notes generated by AI, says Dr. Rebecca Mechoris, chief health information officer and vice president at Mass General Brigham, a health care organization in Boston.

“Generative AI will make you hallucinate; that’s the nature of pattern-based, predictive technology. That’s why it’s so important for doctors to review draft notes before signing them. At the end of the day, the responsibility for documentation falls on the doctor,” she told TechCrunch via email.

Kin Health currently only shows notes from conversations it records during consultations, but the company said it plans to bring in data from other health sources, including doctors’ own notes through electronic health record (EHR) systems, this year.

The company says it will keep the app free forever, and will monetize through referrals to services like specialists and labs. The startup is taking a leaf out of GoodRx’s playbook, which also keeps the core product free and earns commissions by referring other services.

Tools provided by health care providers often expect patients to coordinate their own treatment procedures, said Natalie DeLeon, a partner at Maveron. “Kin is designed to solve very different needs for the consumer: they can move with them between specialists, systems and providers. It is not owned by any one health network or EHR relationship. It is designed to serve the patient, not the organization, and that is a huge distribution advantage,” she said.

The funding round also saw participation from Town Hall Ventures, Eniac Ventures, Flex Capital, Foundry Square Capital, Pear VC and The Family Fund. Hirsch and Bezdek of GoodRx; angel investors Jay Desai, Nabeel Qureshi, Alex Cohen, and Saharsh Patel; More than 30 doctors have also invested.