WILLIAMSBURG – A new health care app designed to help patients better understand their medical appointments is expected to launch publicly as early as this summer, pending final certification.
Graham Henshaw, entrepreneur and co-founder of Clareo Health, described the platform as “a patient-first app that turns medical conversations into clear summaries and next steps, helping patients and caregivers understand and follow their care.”
Henshaw also clarified that “Clareo does not provide medical advice, diagnose conditions, or replace clinicians.”
“It supercharges their ability to be a strong advocate for their own health care or for the health care of a loved one,” Henshaw said. “It recognizes the just default limitations we have as humans to be able to take in a lot of information, especially when we’re stressed, even more so when it’s foreign to us because it’s medical terminology.”
Clareo will be an app on your phone and is designed to listen to medical appointments and take notes. “It listens to medical appointments for you and takes notes for you so you don’t have to worry about that side of it, and then after the fact, it will organize that information and present it back to you with one goal in mind,” Henshaw said. “The goal is to help you understand better.”
The idea grew out of Henshaw’s personal experiences navigating cancer, first with his father and later with his own diagnosis of stage 3 melanoma. He recalled calling his father after appointments and asking how they went.
“I can’t count how many times I asked him, how’d the visit go, and then he wouldn’t have much to say, and it would usually be like, I don’t know, like that was really the answer,” he said.
Years later, after his father died, Henshaw was diagnosed with the same skin cancer. He was treated at VCU Cancer Center, where his oncologist advised him to bring someone to appointments.
“I really had no idea what was said in that appointment,” Henshaw said. “I do only remember one thing.”
His wife took notes, which he said changed the course of his experience. That pattern of having someone present to capture and process information became a foundation for Clareo’s development.
Through more than 100 pages of notes from conversations with patients and caregivers, Henshaw said he began to see clear differences in health care experiences.
“I started to see patterns with those people that generally understood their situation much more deeply,” he said. “They had a grasp of what the treatment plan was going to be, and they were stronger advocates.”
By contrast, he said, those with more negative experiences often lacked those support structures. “They go into an appointment by themselves, they don’t understand what’s being said, they leave, then they don’t follow up with any of the things the doctor said to do,” he said.
Clareo aims to bridge that gap. The app records conversations, generates summaries and allows users to ask follow-up questions based on the transcript.
“We treat the transcript as like the source of truth,” Henshaw said. “So, you could ask a question of the note that gets generated as if you were still in the room.”
He pointed to research on medical recall to illustrate the problem the app addresses. “We forget up to 80% of the information immediately following an appointment, 80%,” he said. “And then, of the 20% that we can remember, half of that is actually inaccurate.”
The technology behind the app mirrors tools already used by some providers to generate clinical notes. “This is just that, but aimed at the patient,” Henshaw said.
Doctors who have advised the company have helped shape features, including a tool that allows patients to prepare for appointments by organizing their concerns into concise talking points.
Privacy and security remain central concerns as the company prepares for launch. Henshaw said Clareo is built on compliant platforms and that patient data is encrypted and firewalled.
“All of that data is encrypted, and it’s all firewalled to the AI,” he said. “There are settings that basically you can enable those AI providers to use that as data for training, and all of those settings are turned off.”
The company is now working toward HIPAA compliance certification before releasing the app publicly.
“We have a fully functioning proof of concept solution that works and is adding value to patients lives right now,” Henshaw said. “But it will take some some time for us we wouldn’t want to launch publicly without being able to say we’re HIPAA compliant and that certification has been received.”
Henshaw said he hopes Clareo will be available to everyone soon.
“We’re hoping that by this summer,” he said.
To learn more about Clareo, visit clareohealth.com.
