Armed with a recent $9 million seed funding raise, Westwood-based Kin Health Technologies Inc. is now trying to make good on its promise as a patient-focused notetaker app.

The idea is simple: help bewildered patients, and in many cases, their overwhelmed relatives or caregivers, fully remember and understand their conversations with doctors and specialists. This includes diagnoses, instructions on medications, and other therapies and referrals to specialists.

“The most important moment in a patient’s care is the conversation with their doctor,” said Arpan Parikh, a physician and one of the three co-founders who is also chief executive. “Everything else – adherence, follow-through, outcomes – flows from whether they understood it.”

Kin Health’s app joins a rapidly growing array of other apps that transcribe and summarize physician-patient meetings, including those tied to electronic medical records found in hospitals and physician offices. But the distinguishing feature of Kin Health’s app is that it’s operated by and for patients. Most of the other apps are designed to provide patient-doctor meeting summaries for care provider teams. Patients can sometimes view them, but because they are intended for healthcare professionals, they can be difficult for patients to interpret.

“So far, that (conversation) moment hasn’t been addressed for patients,” Parikh said. “We built Kin to change that.”

Last month, Kin Health announced $9 million in seed funding, led by Seattle-based Maveron. Participating in the funding round were Town Hall Ventures, Flex Capital, Eniac Ventures, the Family Fund, Pear VC, Watershed Ventures, Foundry Square Capital and several individual investors.

‘Light bulb’ moment

Kin Health was founded just last summer by Parikh and his physician brother Amit Parikh, along with Kyle Alwyn, who several years ago co-founded telemedicine service HeyDoctor, which sold to Santa Monica-based GoodRx Holdings Inc. in 2019 for an undisclosed sum.

The trio immediately convinced GoodRx co-founders Trevor Bezdek and Doug Hirsch to come on board as founding partners and board members. The pair also are investors in Kin Health. Arpan Parikh said that one of the driving forces behind the decision to launch the company was his personal experience five years ago helping his mother-in-law through her breast cancer treatment.

“I was mostly here in Southern California and she was in Ohio,” he said. “It became a game of telephone: My mother-in-law would hear a conversation with her physician and then relay points to us. In the process, we found out later, she got some wrong or left some important things out.”

He said that’s when he had the “light bulb” moment of developing a patient-centered notetaker app for patient-doctor meetings. It took a little time for the artificial intelligence technology to catch up to enable the app to transcribe and summarize accurately the often-complex points that can come up in these meetings. Of course, there are now other ways for patients to get meeting summaries of their visits with doctors: going to the provider’s website and accessing patient visit notes and summaries.

App for all doctors

But one advantage of Kin Health’s app is that it works for all doctors the patient might see.

“Right now, medical records follow the doctor and his or her provider network,” said Karthik Sarma, who is part of the AI in Mental Health Research Group at the department of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at UC San Francisco.

“This app works for all doctors a patient might see, even doctors that are out-of-network,” Sarma said. “Also, if a patient is seeing multiple doctors for a condition, this app can put everything together in a coherent summary.”

On a cautionary note, Sarma said that with any AI-driven app, there is the possibility of the app making errors in the transcriptions or summaries of the conversations.

Alwyn of Kin Health said that extensive steps have been taken to ensure that such
“AI hallucinations” are minimized, so that what the app states is the actual conversation that took place.

Monetizing the ‘action steps’

The first iteration of the app launched late last year. It’s strictly a notetaking and transcription service. It’s free for patients, which the brothers said is essential for patients.

Revenue generation won’t come until the second iteration comes out later this year, they said. That iteration will include “action steps” that arise out of the patient-doctor meetings: referrals to specialists, prescriptions and so on.

“If a thyroid condition is at issue, Kin might hear me make a referral to an endocrinologist and then the Kin comes up with a list of three endocrinologists near the patient’s address,” Arpan Parikh said. “Or there might be two prescriptions mentioned and Kin might tie in with GoodRx to find the cheapest pharmacy for the drugs.”

Kin will hopefully be able to monetize those action steps, perhaps through partnership arrangements with certain specialists or prescription drug providers. “That’s where Trevor (Bezdek) and Doug (Hirsch) will be able to help us,” he said. “That’s what they did with GoodRx.”