palmER vs Freed.

Freed and palmER are both tools clinicians can choose and start using themselves. Neither requires a hospital or health-system deployment.

Freed is an AI scribe used across a range of clinical specialties, with additional tools for independent practices and clinics.

palmER was built specifically for emergency medicine and urgent care by emergency physicians. It includes ambient documentation, but continues through the rest of the ED encounter, including the MDM after the workup is complete.

At a glance

Ambient documentation is only part of the ED chart

Both products listen to the patient encounter and generate clinical documentation from it.

The difference becomes clear after that. In emergency medicine, much of the information needed for the final chart does not exist yet.

Labs result. Imaging comes back. You reassess the patient. You review outside records, speak with a consultant, give additional treatment, or change the plan. The workup and everything that happens afterward determine the final disposition.

The MDM happens after the conversation

palmER separates ambient documentation from the final MDM because they happen at different points in the encounter.

During the initial encounter, palmER listens and drafts the HPI and Physical Exam. Once the workup is complete, it uses the chart, including the history, exam, labs, imaging, reassessments, consultations, treatment, and disposition, to draft the MDM.

Freed's public materials describe ambient clinical notes, coding suggestions, and other documentation tools, but do not describe an ED-specific MDM workflow built around the completed workup.

palmER also tracks patients through the shift, reviews charts for missing documentation before you sign, generates patient-facing discharge documents, helps organize consultant calls, and includes the palmEM emergency medicine reference.

What happens to your encounter data?

Freed's security page states that recordings are stored temporarily while notes are generated and quality checks are completed, then automatically deleted. It also states that its AI is trained using de-identified notes.

palmER does not store encounter audio. Patient data automatically deletes within 24 hours, and nothing you enter is used to train AI models.

With any AI documentation product, it is worth asking what remains after the encounter. Is audio retained? Is the transcript retained? Are generated drafts retained? Is encounter data used for model training? For how long is each type of data kept?

We cover those questions in more detail in What Does Your AI Scribe Save?.

Which one fits?

If you primarily want an ambient scribe for ambulatory clinical documentation, Freed is one option available directly.

If you work in emergency medicine or urgent care and want a private and secure platform built around the full ED encounter, including the MDM and the work that happens after the initial conversation, palmER was built for that.

Try palmER free for 30 days. No credit card required.

Or see the full palmER vs. Freed comparison.