Frequently asked questions
For patients and families
Will my mother know she is talking to an AI?
Yes. Alma identifies herself as an AI assistant from almyhealth. We do not present her as a human being, and we do not allow ambiguity about it. Patients also give explicit consent before Alma begins calling, including separate consent for voice analysis, collected by phone in plain language.
What if she does not have a smartphone, an app or internet?
She does not need any of them. Alma works over an ordinary telephone, including a landline. There is nothing to install, nothing to charge and no connection to set up. The app is optional for people who want it.
Is this replacing her doctor?
No. Alma follows the plan her clinician wrote. She does not diagnose, prescribe, change medications or make clinical decisions. When something looks wrong, she alerts the care team so a person can decide. In an emergency, call 911.
What happens to the recordings of her voice?
Voice recordings are biometric data and we treat them as our most sensitive category. We ask for consent to capture them separately from general medical consent. No vendor we work with is permitted to keep them or use them to train their own models. When she stops using almyhealth, or the recovery period ends, her voiceprint is deleted. That is built into the software, not a manual process.
Will you tell me how my parent is doing?
Only with your parent's authorization. We know that is not the answer an anxious adult child wants. It is the right one. Health information belongs to the patient, and mental health information in particular is not shared with family members without explicit permission. Your parent can authorize you during onboarding.
What if my mother becomes attached to Alma?
We take that seriously, and we designed against it. Alma actively encourages contact with family, caregivers and community, and frames those relationships as more important than her own. If a patient indicates that Alma is their only friend or main connection, we treat that as a clinical concern and surface it to their care coordinator. It is not something we count as success.
For providers
How is this different from an automated reminder call?
An automated reminder broadcasts. Alma has a conversation. She confirms a specific medication by the name your patient actually uses for it, asks the monitoring questions in your care plan, records the answers as structured clinical data, and escalates to your team when something falls outside range. A reminder produces no data and no signal. Alma produces both.
You have no certifications. Why would our security review approve you?
Today it should not approve us for production patient data, and we will say that to your CISO directly. We are pre-launch. Our HIPAA program is designed and documented across governance, risk analysis, technical safeguards, training, vendor agreements and breach response, and we can share that documentation now. An independent penetration test and HIPAA gap analysis are planned before enterprise deployment, and SOC 2 Type II is targeted within twelve months of launch.
What we can do today is a pilot structured around that reality, with the scope and safeguards agreed in advance.
Will it work with our electronic health record?
almyhealth is designed for connection through FHIR APIs, with an API and SDK architecture for custom integration into existing workflows. Interoperability with major platforms including Epic and Cerner is on our roadmap and is not yet built. We will not tell you a connector exists before it does.