Healthcare has been digitised for clinicians, but the patient experience has lagged behind. Patients still walk out of a consultation having retained only a fraction of what was said, then have to navigate fragmented portals written from the hospital’s perspective rather than their own. Roughly one in three Dutch adults has problematic or inadequate health literacy, with concrete consequences: lower treatment adherence, unnecessary follow-ups, and rising costs in a system already under pressure.

The technical and regulatory pieces are now falling into place. AI can convert unstructured care interactions into clear, patient-usable summaries, and the European Health Data Space is reducing friction for patient-facing tools. Ditto is building exactly that layer: a privacy-first, patient-owned interface for the medical journey.

Ditto starts as a “patient scribe”: users record their consultation or photograph a doctor’s letter, and within minutes receive a structured, plain-language summary with diagnoses, treatment plans and action points. Available in Dutch, English, Turkish and Arabic. Summaries can be securely shared with family members and caregivers via end-to-end encryption, embedding care coordination directly into the product. The system is privacy-by-design, with EU-based processing and clinically validated AI guardrails.

From here, the roadmap evolves toward longitudinal care ownership: visual care journeys, managed caregiver accounts, and integrations with insurers and providers. Ditto becomes the interface through which the entire patient journey is captured.

Health and wellbeing is a core focus for Rubio’s People team: we look for technology that gives people more ownership of their own care. Ditto turns one of healthcare’s most persistent problems into a win for everyone involved: patients understand more and adhere better to their treatment, family members and caregivers stay informed and can help, and clinicians spend less time on repetition. All the ingredients are there for Ditto to become the trusted companion for navigating healthcare across Europe. Together with lead investor Heal Capital and Optiverder, the investment vehicle of Dutch entrepreneur Chris Oomen, Rubio joined Ditto’s seed round.

Ditto was founded in 2024 in Rotterdam by Tobias Polak, Bart Voorn and Merlijn van Breugel after Merlijn’s grandmother received a cancer diagnosis. Tobias holds a PhD in biostatistics from Erasmus MC and brings FDA/EMA experience from his time at myTomorrows. Bart led AI and robotics innovation at Ahold Delhaize. Merlijn is a PhD candidate in AI and pediatric lung disease, formerly Lead Data Scientist at Rewire. Together they lead a team that includes former Spotify and Google engineers, healthtech operators from myTomorrows and CareXS, and growth experts from Bunq and Storytel.