A Spanish-speaking visitor from South America, in Taiwan on business, filled out his Brief in Spanish before walking into clinic. One tap later the doctor was reading it in Chinese — and not a word of what the patient wrote had been changed. How iRehab Brief handles language: a human-reviewed multilingual question bank, translation the doctor chooses to run, and the patient's own words always kept — plus the things we deliberately don't do.
Brief was built to solve a doctor's problem: let patients say what matters most, in their own words, before the visit. But in clinic we kept seeing the same scene: the one holding the phone was a grandchild who had come with an older patient. This piece is about what that scene made us rethink, and where Brief goes next.
Most clinical AI demos feature the tidy post-op patient with weeks of longitudinal data. The clinic-reality majority are first visits: no history in the system, a single verbal complaint, and roughly 60–70% with no surgical need. This post is about what iRehab calls the pre-visit Brief — the short, structured summary that lands on the physician's screen before the patient sits down — and why its central design constraint is that the patient cannot answer 'is it tendon or nerve?'
