Playback Health

AI now runs through both halves of a product that began with a neurosurgeon recording audio instructions and film reviews for patients to replay at home. On the clinician side, Playback Pro captures the visit and generates the note, codes and orders. On the patient side, an AI assistant answers questions from established protocols and the care documented in the patient's record. Recorded explanations and care plans from the clinician remain the core of what patients replay.

Notes move through four steps: record, format, refine and upload to the EHR, so the clinician refines the note before it leaves Playback. During the encounter the scribe also generates ICD-10 and CPT codes and medical orders, and the platform reads from and writes back to the EHR. On the patient side, the AI assistant answers from protocols and documented care, and questions outside the record go to the care team. No confidence threshold or separate review step for codes and orders is described.

The ambient scribe listens in real time and drafts notes through a multi model engine, retrieval over patient context from the record, and more than 80 specialty and subspecialty templates, with AI translation across more than 15 languages. The company quotes 99% transcription accuracy from its own measurement. That figure comes without a published test design or a note level accuracy measure.

The AI engine runs several medical AI models in parallel from OpenAI, Anthropic and Groq and uses the best available response, which the company says improves reliability, resilience to outages and quality. Playback's own team maintains the engine and runs quarterly optimization cycles for embedded customers. Under the privacy policy, third party providers may process data only to support Playback Health services and under confidentiality obligations. The specific models, hosting arrangement and subprocessors are not named.

Most of the results the company reports measure how well patients understand and act on their care. At Lenox Hill Hospital, Press Ganey HCAHPS rankings for 2022 and 2023 placed Playback care groups above standard care on all eight selected measures, and in 2023 the care team's percentile rank for patients' understanding of care at discharge reached the 87th against the 60th under standard care. Two 2024 papers, in Clinical Neurology and Neurosurgery and in Cureus, associate the platform with better patient perspectives of care and stronger neurosurgical resident communication skills. Platform data shows an 82% open rate for care plans, and a national pediatric specialty care provider reported consult to treatment conversion rising from 70% to 77% in a 2022 review.

Northwell Health has used Playback since early 2020 and added its AI note generation under a three year partnership in March 2024. CB Insights placed Playback as a Challenger in its clinical documentation market matrix alongside Microsoft, Oracle and Amazon. None of this work measures the accuracy of the AI notes, codes or orders.

A governance layer adds automated data retention policies, audit logging and role based access, and data is encrypted in transit and at rest with layered protections. Patients receive care plans through a secure link by text or email with no app download, or through an iOS app that syncs records by a secure token based process, stores them encrypted behind the device passcode, and removes them from the device and Playback Health Cloud when the patient removes the account. Patients can then pass that content on to family and other clinicians. The company does not say whether customer data trains its models.

The company includes a business associate agreement with the platform, which it describes as support for compliant healthcare deployments, and states that protected health information is handled securely across workflows and integrations. Its service level agreement commits it to comply with HIPAA and GDPR. The privacy policy, effective September 16, 2019, covers patients using the iOS app, with GDPR rights and a CalOPPA Do Not Track position. The agreement text and its scope are not published.

Two stage encryption protects data in transit and at rest on HIPAA compliant infrastructure, under controls the company describes as aligned with SOC 2 security standards. Every conversation is captured and access controlled, a record the company ties to prior authorization, appeals and care transitions. Its SOC 2 Type II report is still in process.

Clinicians refine the notes the scribe drafts before upload, a documentation use that needs no FDA clearance. Clinicians also record the film reviews, explanations and bedside discharge instructions that patients replay. Alongside them, an AI patient assistant answers patients' plain language questions around the clock, grounded in the record and in the practice's own protocols, consent forms and guides. The company does not say how it classifies an assistant that answers patients directly.

Coding extraction pulls ICD-10 and CPT codes, medications and orders from every encounter, which the company says reduces coding burden, captures appropriate revenue and shortens visit to claim cycles. Admin dashboards track adoption, quality scoring, conversion and compliance monitoring, and assistant responses stay on protocol and tied to the practice's approved knowledge base. No fairness statement, subgroup results or accent and dialect testing is published.

Customers get a service level agreement that guarantees 99.9% monthly uptime, with credit toward future payments when uptime falls short, scheduled maintenance capped at 4 hours a month with at least 48 hours notice, and support around the clock by phone, email and chat, under New York law. When a clinician updates a shared care plan, the change reaches everyone it was shared with. No warranty, indemnity or remediation commitment covers errors in generated notes, codes, orders or assistant answers.

Notes, codes and orders write back to Epic, eClinicalWorks, NextGen, athenahealth, Meditech and other record systems, and the integrations also include Cerner, Allscripts and DrChrono. The connection is SMART on FHIR compliant and reads patient data from the EHR to give notes context. Rollout runs in three phases: a standalone product deployed in under 30 days, integrated workflows across teams, then a data pipeline API for enterprise analytics, built on HL7 FHIR and a REST API. Digital health companies can call encounter capture, note and code generation and patient journeys from their own code through the PlaybackSDK.

Records are kept encrypted in Playback Health Cloud, and EHR integration takes 30 days on the company's timeline. The AI engine draws on models from three outside providers, and the privacy policy allows data to be transferred to and processed in the United States and other jurisdictions. By design, care content also comes to rest on patients' phones, where they replay it and share it with family and the next clinician. No hosting region, residency option or subprocessor list is published.

Contracts come in three packages that the company calls a platform partnership rather than a SaaS subscription: a 30 to 60 day proof and blueprint pilot deployed to one or two care pods, an annual embedded program with platform subscription, customized workflows and quarterly optimization cycles, and a multiyear enterprise buildout with a shared development roadmap and a dedicated Playback team under SLAs.

Playback Pro offers a free trial, and an Engage ROI calculator models returns from an organization's own volume, revenue per procedure and conversion rate. None of the three packages carries a published price.

Deployments run from single practices and multisite groups to enterprise systems such as Northwell Health, with clinicians at Lenox Hill Hospital, Syosset Hospital, Tallahassee Neurological Clinic, Glen Cove Physician Partners and Portland Trauma Healing, and air medical transport at Life Link III.

Templates cover more than 80 specialties and subspecialties, and the platform program targets mental health, chronic care, cardiometabolic, MSK and fertility groups, remote patient monitoring and home health platforms, and neuro, ortho, GI, surgery center and specialty pediatric networks.

Capture covers ambient listening, telehealth recording, dictation and film review in more than 15 languages, and patient journeys run from the consult and surgical preparation through discharge and long term follow up.