CAIHL read · Jun 12, 2026
Recording medical visits is your legal right
Framework
What CAIHL does
Critical AI Health Literacy (CAIHL) is an analytical lens — Hugo Campos and Liz Salmi's 2025 National Academy of Medicine commentary, "Critical AI Health Literacy as Liberation Technology." It applies Paulo Freire's theory of critical literacy to health AI.
The central question CAIHL asks is whose interests does this AI actually serve? Four dimensions answer it: who is the primary user, where is it hosted, whose interests does it advance, and does it expand or constrain patient agency.
This deep-read separates the four dimensions on a single item from the day's scan, so you can see the specific structural shape of the AI in question — not just the bucket it landed in.
The four dimensions
How this item reads through CAIHL
Primary user
patient
Patients, families, and care partners are the primary users of this AI.
Hosting
public
Hosted for public use (ChatGPT, Claude, consumer apps). Anyone with a device can use it.
Interests
patient-aligned
Interest structure prioritizes patients. Operates on a philanthropic, public-service, or advocacy footing.
Agency
expanding
Expands patient capabilities, supports their questions, increases their ability to act on their own values across and beyond health systems.
Editor's CAIHL read
One-sentence synthesis
Patient-side recording rights surfaced as legal infrastructure; expanding agency at the consultation layer the AI vendors have been one-sidedly inhabiting.
In the scan
How this item appeared in the daily scan
Editor's note: Patient-side recording rights are the participatory-medicine answer to the asymmetry the Health Services Daily piece dismissed yesterday. The clinician's AI scribe is normalized; the patient's recorder is treated as confrontation. The law disagrees with the asymmetry.
Summary: KevinMD: Clinician-essay walking through the legal framework that lets patients record their own medical visits in single-party-consent states — the patient-side analogue to the clinician-side ambient-scribe deployment.
methodology
Limitations
CAIHL is a lens, not a verdict. The four dimensions are conditions of use — reassess them when a tool's business model, deployment context, or patient behavior changes. See the NAM commentary for the full framework.