How often does it happen that you leave a doctor’s consultation room with more questions than answers? The Ditto ZorgApp must put an end to this, by translating difficult medical terms into easier language.
The idea of the app came from founder Bart Voorn from personal frustration. “I went to the hospital with my father, to the Emergency Department. That was a very stressful situation, where we received a lot of information from different doctors. When I left with him at the end of the day, we wondered: what actually happened? We didn’t understand everything or remember well.”
So Voorn came up with the idea for an app that records conversations with doctors and translates it into easy language. “I understand that doctors use medical terms, so they are trained and so they talk to each other. But if I want to make a decision as a patient what I want to do, or I want to enter a certain treatment, it is just very difficult.”
The founder of Ditto found out that you can record medical conversations and that is exactly what Ditto does. “You turn the app on your phone, make a recording and immediately afterwards you get a very simple and clear summary.”
The app, which you can download for free, is already live, but a lot of feedback has already been received with which Voorn wants to continue to develop the app. “We can’t let him run live yet. And a question that we got a lot, for example, is whether the app can make follow -up questions based on earlier agreements. What did I discuss again at the time? Maybe you should all buy devices or do exercises. The app might be able to help you with that.”
The University Medical Center Groningen (UMCG) also sees salvation in the app and will help Ditto further develop. “We will look together with the UMCG at the engine that is in the app. If no good summary can be made now, the app will also indicate this. We will not take any risk. But with the UMCG we will look at that engine to ensure that it does as often as possible.”
A tricky point with medical data is privacy, ditto has had to make a hard choice. “We have decided that all data will be stored on your phone. We cannot go to the recordings that are made.”
Voorn expects his app to greatly improve healthcare in the Netherlands. “More and more technology is becoming available that is used by doctors in the hospital. But what the patient federation, for example, also likes that technology becomes available for patients. Sixty percent of the conversations is forgotten, that is such a shame. So we think we can improve healthcare if we also focus on technology for patients.”