palmER vs Commure.

palmER and Commure both listen to the room and draft the note. That is where they overlap.

Commure sells to health systems. Its platform runs from ambient documentation through autonomous coding, claims, and revenue cycle, and it is deployed across HCA Healthcare with emergency departments named as a target workflow. It also sells a separate self-serve product, Commure Scribe, aimed at clinics. Neither one is an ED charting platform.

We are emergency medicine physicians, and we built palmER for one department: ours. You can start it yourself the same day.

At a glance

The MDM is the part that gets read later

An ambient scribe hears the encounter, so it can draft the HPI. It cannot draft the MDM. In the ED, the MDM is written after the workup: the labs, the imaging, the reassessment, the consult, the disposition. By then the conversation is over and your decision-making has moved on.

palmER generates the MDM once the workup is back. Paste the chart, and in under 15 seconds it drafts the differential, the risk stratification, the data you reviewed, and the disposition rationale. You edit it, then it goes in the chart. Commure's public pages describe ambient capture, coding, and CareCues prompts that nudge documentation toward billing completeness. They do not describe an emergency medicine MDM workflow.

Two products, neither built for your shift

Commure's product that names the ED is the enterprise one. Buying it runs through a committee: procurement, security review, IT configuration, rollout. You are not in that room, and the timeline is not yours.

Commure Scribe is the one you can start yourself. Its listed specialties are family medicine, internal medicine, psychiatry, pediatrics, behavioral health, and dentistry. It is a clinic scribe with a coding engine, priced and positioned for scheduled visits.

palmER arrives on your next shift. Trial it free for 30 days, use it on a real patient, and decide before anyone signs anything. No credit card, no integration, no waiting on procurement.

What each one keeps

palmER stores no audio. Drafts and questions auto-delete within 24 hours, and nothing is used to train AI models. Because palmER sits beside the EMR instead of inside it, the only text that becomes part of the record is the text you reviewed and pasted.

Commure publishes its default for Commure Scribe: audio is kept for one year, then archived for a minimum of six years. Transcripts and notes stay until you delete them. For the enterprise product, retention follows the contract your health system signed, and Commure's privacy policy keeps account data for up to six years after an account closes and anonymized data indefinitely.

Commure describes itself as a platform for "AI-powered intake, documentation, coding, claims, and payment solutions," and the first picture on its homepage is a revenue-cycle dashboard: AR distribution, denial rate, first-pass rate. If you work at HCA, where Commure is the system-wide ambient platform, the retention terms are the hospital's, not yours.

Why we care: a parallel record of your shift that outlives the shift is discoverable. Under Commure's published default, audio from a shift is still stored seven years later. We wrote about the retention question in more detail in what does your AI scribe save. Whichever vendor you pick, ask what is retained, for how long, and who can produce it.

Who each fits

Commure fits a health system standardizing documentation, coding, and revenue cycle across many specialties, with the budget and integration work that goes with it. Commure Scribe fits a clinic that wants an ambient note and a coding suggestion for scheduled visits.

palmER fits emergency and urgent care clinicians who want an EM-native MDM, patient tracking across a shift, pre-sign chart review, consult call language, and palmEM reference in one place. It is not a general clinic scribe, and it is not an enterprise rollout.

Try palmER free for 30 days. No credit card. Then see the full comparison.