# Clinician FAQ > Answers to product, workflow, legal, and compliance questions about Kin for clinicians. - Canonical URL: https://www.meetkin.com/clinician-guide - Published by: Kin Health (https://www.meetkin.com) ## Product, workflow, & practical ### What specialties does Kin work with? Kin is specialty-agnostic. It is designed around the patient's conversation, not around a clinical template, so it works across primary care, specialty medicine, procedural specialties, and ancillary care. The value is highest in visits that produce dense instruction sets or that a patient has to relay to a family member or a downstream provider, such as oncology, cardiology, endocrinology, rheumatology, neurology, maternal-fetal medicine, pediatrics, psychiatry medication management, and surgical pre-op and post-op. No specialty-specific setup, templates, or clinician-side configuration is required. ### Can Kin be used outside a physician's office (dentist, dietitian, nutritionist, physical therapist, etc.)? Yes. Kin is built for any care conversation where the patient needs to recall, act on, or share what was discussed. Typical non-physician use includes dental visits, physical and occupational therapy, dietitian and nutritionist consults, speech therapy, chiropractic, and midwifery. The regulatory framing does not change by setting: Kin remains a patient-directed consumer app whether the provider is an MD, DO, DDS, RD, DPT, or other licensed professional. ### How accurate is Kin, and how is that verified? Accuracy is addressed at three layers. **Capture.** Kin uses industry-leading speech recognition models with word error rates (WER) of 5% or less, along with speaker diarization to distinguish clinician speech from patient speech. **Validation.** Summaries are grounded in and evidenced by the source conversation. Kin checks outputs against the source audio to confirm they reflect what was said, and continues to expand its validation suite to proactively check every patient-facing output for inaccurate content. **Clinical validation.** Kin's clinical team and machine learning engineers assess output for clinically meaningful error and continue to validate the product against a high clinical bar. Kin is also working toward a formal academic study for peer-reviewed publication. ### Does Kin work with a psychotherapist? Kin can be used in therapy visits when the patient chooses to record and wants help with recall or follow-through; it can be helpful in helping patients (clients) access insights from therapy sessions, between sessions. ### Is Kin appropriate for pediatric patients, older adults, or patients with cognitive impairment? Yes, with the appropriate person operating the account. Kin is designed around a Care Circle model in which a parent, adult child, spouse, or legal guardian can act as the account operator for a dependent, whether that dependent is a child, an older adult, or a patient with cognitive impairment. The designated caregiver manages recording, reviews the summary, and drives follow-through, which mirrors how these visits already work in practice. ### Can Kin be used during telemedicine visits? Yes. Kin is modality-agnostic. The patient runs it on their phone in the same room as, or alongside, the telemedicine session on their laptop or tablet. The patient is responsible for their own device and their own recording. Because Kin captures what the patient hears, it works the same way whether the visit is in an exam room or on video. Note: there are currently limitations to using Kin and running a telehealth appointment simultaneously on the phone; we recommend your patient use a separate device (laptop, desktop, tablet) for their telehealth appointment, and place their phone on the desk running Kin. ### How easy is it for a patient to download and start using Kin during the visit? Setup takes less than a minute on the patient's phone in the exam room. Kin is a consumer app on iOS and Android; a new user can create an account, grant microphone permission, and begin a recording without even registering a full account. The clinician does not install anything, log in, or touch the patient's device. If a clinician wants to help a patient get started, a QR code and short handoff explainer are available on the clinician-facing page and can be printed or linked from intake materials. ### Is there a cost to the clinician or the practice? No. Kin is completely free to all parties: the patient, their loved ones, and the clinician / practice. There is nothing to install, license, or reconcile with a vendor on the clinician side. If a practice wants printable materials or a QR code to help patients discover Kin, those are available at no cost. ### Who has access to the summary once it is created? By default, only the patient. Kin generates the summary on the patient's account, and the patient chooses who, if anyone, to share it with. Kin's Care Circle lets a patient invite trusted people such as a spouse, adult child, or caregiver with role-based permissions to see the summary and action list. Sharing is granular: a patient can share specific visits rather than their full history, and Kin is building Smart Privacy Controls so a user can selectively exclude sensitive topics (mental health, substance use, sexual history) from what a particular caregiver sees. ### Can the patient share Kin's summary with me (the clinician)? Yes. A patient can share their Kin summary with you the same way they would share any personal document, typically by sending a PDF or text copy through your patient portal, email, or reviewing it with you at a follow-up visit. Kin does not automatically push data into your EHR and does not create a parallel record on your systems. Anything from Kin that ends up in your chart only gets there because you or the patient chose to put it there, and the clinical note remains the authoritative record. ### What features will Kin build next? Kin's roadmap is organized around four patient jobs: capturing more of the care journey, helping patients follow through on the plan, keeping loved ones and caregivers in the loop, and giving patients finer control over what they share. Near-term work includes Documents & Notes, which lets a patient keep after-visit summaries, lab and imaging reports, medication lists, and vaccine records alongside their recorded visits; Action Items and Visit Prep for better follow-through and pre-visit preparation; a Care Circle management refresh and expanded caregiver notifications so a family member or adult child can stay current without the patient forwarding anything; Smarter Visit Suggestions so upcoming appointments detected from the patient's calendar are handled more intelligently; Smart Privacy Controls so a patient can selectively exclude sensitive topics such as mental health or substance use from what a given caregiver sees; and Spanish-language support across both the app and AI-generated summaries. Every item stays on the patient side of the visit. ## Legal & compliance ### What is Kin, legally? Kin is a patient-directed consumer app, not a healthcare provider, not an AI chatbot, and not an EHR. Its core function is to help a patient record their own visit on their own device, convert that conversation into a plain-language summary and action list, track follow-through across their care journey, and share these summaries and action lists with their loved ones. ### Is Kin FDA-cleared or regulated as a medical device? No. FDA regulates only a subset of digital health software functions, with attention concentrated on software that functions as a medical device. Software that records, organizes, and summarizes health information for patient use, without diagnosing, treating, or transforming a phone into a regulated medical device, generally falls outside the main bucket of FDA-enforced medical device oversight. ### Is Kin practicing medicine or giving medical advice? No. Kin does not diagnose, prescribe, or direct treatment. The treating clinician remains the decision-maker, and the patient remains the end user. Kin's role is organizational and translational: capture the conversation, summarize it in plain language, and help the patient remember and complete next steps. That distinction matters both clinically and legally. ### Is Kin part of the medical record? No, unless you independently choose to import or document something from it. Kin is a patient-controlled tool. It is not your EHR, not your clinical note, and not your formal legal chart by default. It is better understood as the patient's own aid for recall, coordination, and follow-through. ### Does HIPAA apply to Kin? No. HIPAA applies to covered entities and their business associates. A consumer health app is only directly subject to HIPAA if it is acting on behalf of a covered entity or business associate in a way that brings it into HIPAA scope. HHS states that many third-party apps designated by patients are not themselves HIPAA-regulated entities, even though covered entities must often release information to an app the patient designates. ### Does a clinician need a BAA with Kin? No. A BAA is generally required when a vendor is creating, receiving, maintaining, or transmitting PHI on behalf of a covered entity. If the patient is independently using Kin for their own purposes, the usual business associate framework does not automatically apply. ### Can a patient legally record the visit? Yes. Consent law varies by state and by circumstance. Federal law is a one-party-consent baseline (meaning only one person in a conversation has to consent to recording a conversation, in order to legally be allowed to record it). States can impose stricter consent rules (today, 12 states have two-party-consent laws, meaning all parties involved in a conversation must consent to its being recorded). Kin should be used only with clear consent that complies with the law and its terms of service. ### What is the cleanest way for clinicians to think about Kin? Think of it as the patient-side analog to your clinician ambient scribe. Provider ambient tools help clinicians remember and document. Kin helps patients remember, understand, and act. Those are complementary functions, not competing ones. ### Does Kin replace the after-visit summary, portal, or clinician note? No. It fills a different gap. Portals and after-visit summaries are delayed, clinician-authored, and fragmented across institutions. Kin is immediate, patient-controlled, and designed to travel across the patient's real-world care journey. ### What if the summary is imperfect or misses nuance? Kin should be treated like any other memory aid: useful, but not authoritative over the clinician's note or the actual treatment plan. A patient should rely on the clinician for medical judgment and on Kin for recall, sharing, and task tracking. ### Does Kin create malpractice risk for clinicians? Not inherently. The bigger practical issue is expectation-setting. A clinician should assume that patients may document, record, or summarize encounters in many ways already: handwritten notes, family recall, portal messages, or phone recordings. Kin standardizes that behavior into a more accurate and usable format. The defensible posture is clear consent, clear boundaries, and no representation that Kin is the legal chart or a substitute for medical advice. Additionally, Kin does not make recordings or transcriptions available to users. ### Does Kin change clinician workflow? No. Kin is patient-operated on the patient's device. The clinician does not need to log in, chart in Kin, or alter any behavior. ### Why would a clinician support Kin's use? Because patients forget a large share of medical instructions, especially in high-stress visits, and better recall improves follow-through. And the average medical practice gets ~10 inbound calls and messages per provider per day from patients who forgot what their provider told them. Kin is built to turn a complex conversation into something a patient and family can actually use after the visit. ### Is Kin 21 CFR Part 11 compliant? For routine patient-directed use, 21 CFR Part 11 does not apply to Kin. Part 11 is an FDA rule for electronic records and electronic signatures used to meet FDA regulatory record keeping or submission requirements. Kin is not intended to serve as an FDA-regulated source record, clinical trial system, or FDA submission platform in the ordinary care setting.