Technology firms behind artificial intelligence–based note-taking software — marketed to therapists as a time-saving administrative tool — have quietly included provisions in their terms and conditions that allow patients’ therapy records to be sold and manipulated to train other AI applications.
Providers outsourcing standard progress notes to automated software, which summarize session recordings and transcripts, may be unknowingly offering patients’ sensitive health information as data fodder to the multibillion-dollar AI therapy industry.
“Most therapists don’t exactly love writing progress notes. What if TheraPro wrote them for you?” asks an AI software company, which charges mental health providers $60 a month for unlimited AI notetaking, including robotic diagnostic assistance and treatment planning.
According to TheraPro’s terms and conditions, once providers sign up, they give TheraPro a “non-exclusive, transferable, assignable, perpetual, royalty-free, worldwide license” to patients’ anonymized therapy sessions.
That includes “without limitation” the right to train “any artificial intelligence program” the firm develops — including in collaboration with third-party contractors. TheraPro retains its right to “store, access, and manipulate” de-identified patient data with third parties while denying liability for how those contractors behave.
Research shows that “de-identified,” anonymized health data — which allows tech firms to circumvent privacy laws — is practically obsolete thanks to advances in machine learning: AI models successfully reidentified individuals from depersonalized data with up to 85 percent accuracy.
“Our goal is to empower therapists with AI, not replace them. . . . Within strict safeguards, we may use de-identified data to enhance our services, always in service of our mission, helping therapists better help their patients heal,” TheraPro wrote in a…
Auteur: Veronica Riccobene
