AI-assisted reader for de-identified notes
inReview
Created and maintained by Yasmine Abbey, MD, MSc · Last reviewed:
Educational decision-support for clinicians. Not medical advice — verify all outputs against your clinical judgment, institutional protocols, and current guidelines.
How inReview reads a set of notes
inReview is a free AI medical note summarizer for clinicians. Paste or upload one or more de-identified inpatient notes — an H&P, daily progress notes, a consult, a discharge summary, an operative note — and it returns a structured summary: the active problems, what changed and when, pending items, and a timeline of the hospitalization. You can then ask questions in plain language ('what was the creatinine trend', 'why was the anticoagulant held') and get answers grounded in the notes you supplied, with the source passage shown.
It is built for the moments that eat a resident's time: picking up a new patient on day five of an admission, preparing a handoff, writing the hospital course for a discharge summary, or reviewing a transfer packet of forty pages. It is documentation support, not a clinical decision tool, and every output should be checked against the original notes.
De-identification happens first, in your browser
Before any text leaves your device, inReview runs the same client-side PHI scrubber that powers the standalone PHI Scrubber tool. Names, medical record numbers, phone numbers, emails, addresses and other direct identifiers are replaced with placeholders. Dates are not deleted but shifted by a random per-session offset, so the model still sees that the creatinine rose over three days while the real dates of service never leave the browser. Only the scrubbed text is sent to the AI model, nothing is stored or used for training, and the full policy is on the privacy page.
The scrubber is pattern-based and conservative, but no automated de-identification is perfect. You remain responsible for reviewing what you paste. The tool warns before submission and will refuse text that still looks like it contains direct identifiers.
What the summary contains
- Highlights: active problems with the current plan for each, in the order a presenter would use them.
- Timeline: dated events across all the notes — admission, procedures, medication changes, consults, escalations — reconstructed from the shifted dates.
- Trends: labs and vitals that changed meaningfully, with the values quoted from the notes.
- Pending: results awaited, consults requested, and follow-ups documented but not yet closed.
- Citations: every item links back to the note and passage it came from, so you can verify it in one click.
Grounded questions and answers
After the summary, you can ask questions about the notes. Answers are generated only from the supplied text: if the notes do not say why a medication was stopped, inReview says that it is not documented rather than inferring a reason. Each answer cites the passage it drew on. This makes it useful for the questions that come up on rounds and in handoffs — what was the discharge plan last time, which antibiotics has the patient already received, what did the consultant recommend — without the risk of an invented answer.
Supported inputs and scanned notes
Paste text, or upload .txt, .docx, and .pdf files. Text-based PDFs are read directly; scanned PDFs fall back to optical character recognition that also runs in the browser, so a scanned transfer packet never leaves your device before de-identification. Each note is labeled by type (H&P, progress, consult, discharge, operative, procedure) so the summary can weight them appropriately.
What inReview is not
- It is not a clinical decision support tool: it summarizes what was written, it does not recommend what to do.
- It can miss or misread content in poorly structured or heavily abbreviated notes, and OCR of low-quality scans introduces errors; always compare against the source.
- It is not a system of record. Nothing you paste is saved; closing the page clears the session.
- It is intended for de-identified clinical text only and for use by clinicians and trainees in an educational and workflow-support capacity.
Frequently asked questions
Is inReview HIPAA compliant?
inReview is designed so that protected health information never reaches a server: de-identification runs entirely in your browser before anything is sent, dates are shifted rather than transmitted, and no text is stored. That design follows the HIPAA Safe Harbor approach to de-identification. Compliance in practice depends on how you use it: paste only de-identified notes, review the scrubbed output, and follow your institution's policy on third-party tools.
Does any patient data get stored or used to train the AI?
No. Only the scrubbed text is sent to the AI model for the duration of the request, nothing is retained by scopeMD, and the text is not used to train any model. The session lives in your browser and is cleared when you close the page.
What kinds of notes work best?
Structured inpatient notes: H&Ps, progress notes, consult notes, discharge summaries, operative and procedure notes. Multiple notes from the same admission give the best timelines. Very long free-text narratives and poorly scanned documents produce weaker summaries.
Can it summarize a scanned PDF?
Yes. Text-based PDFs are read directly, and scanned PDFs are processed by browser-side optical character recognition before de-identification. Low-resolution scans will introduce OCR errors, so check the timeline against the original.
How is this different from the summarizer built into my EHR?
EHR-native summarizers work inside your institution's record and its compliance envelope, and you should prefer them when available. inReview is for the cases they do not cover: outside records, transfer packets, teaching cases, or an institution without such a tool. It works on de-identified text only.
Can I ask it questions about the notes?
Yes. After the summary, ask in plain language. Answers come only from the notes you supplied and cite the passage they used; if the answer is not in the notes, inReview says so.
Will it write my discharge summary?
It will give you a structured hospital course and a timeline that you can use as the skeleton of a discharge summary, but it does not write the final document, and it should not: the summary needs your clinical judgment about what matters and what the next clinician needs to know.
Is inReview free?
Yes. It is free to use with no account. Usage limits may apply at times of high demand so it stays free for everyone.
References
- U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Guidance regarding methods for de-identification of protected health information in accordance with the HIPAA Privacy Rule (Safe Harbor: the 18 identifiers).
- scopeMD Patient Privacy & PHI De-Identification Policy: client-side scrubbing, date shifting, and no-retention commitments.
- Arndt BG, Beasley JW, Watkinson MD, et al. Tethered to the EHR: primary care physician workload assessment using EHR event log data and time-motion observations. Ann Fam Med. 2017;15(5):419–426.