Questions, answered.

Ambient scribing means the AI listens during your patient encounter and generates documentation from the conversation. Most ambient scribes were designed for office visits in a peaceful clinic: scheduled appointments, one patient at a time. That doesn’t work in the ED.

palmER’s Ambient Scribe was built specifically for emergency medicine. See your patient, and palmER writes your HPI and Physical Exam automatically. Switch between patients instantly. Stop and restart scribing as your shift demands without losing context. Add exam findings or corrections after scribing that weren’t said aloud.

No audio is ever stored on our servers or sent to any third party. Speech data is processed and then immediately discarded.

Privacy and security aren’t afterthoughts. They’re foundational. palmER is HIPAA-compliant by design. Your data is only used for one purpose: to respond to what you ask for. Nothing else.

• No data is used for AI training.
• No data is sold to anyone.
• No audio is ever stored on our servers or sent to any third party. No one, including us, can ever listen to any encounter.
• With automatic deletion of patient data within 24 hours, we can’t hand over what doesn’t exist.

We use enterprise-grade encryption (AES-256 at rest, TLS 1.2+ in transit), strict access controls, and comprehensive audit logging. We act as your Business Associate under HIPAA, and we maintain Business Associate Agreements with all subprocessors who may handle PHI. When you use AI features, data is routed only to providers with zero-retention agreements, meaning your data is processed to generate a response but never used for training.

For more details, review our Security & HIPAA page.

If it exists, assume it can be requested. When an AI scribe is purchased by your employer or hospital, or comes embedded in your EMR, it may retain the audio of the encounter, the verbatim transcript, the AI’s draft notes, and your typed inputs long after you sign, and retained data is discoverable in litigation. That shadow record can describe the encounter differently than your signed note does, and most clinicians have never seen the contract or hospital policy that decides how long it exists.

palmER keeps nothing to discover. Audio is never saved: it is transcribed and discarded, so no recording of the encounter ever exists. Transcripts, drafts, and chats auto-delete within 24 hours. Once you sign, the note in your EMR is the only lasting record, just as it was before AI.

Even if your hospital already provides a scribe, it is worth asking what it retains. We wrote up what the major tools keep and the questions to ask.

Hospital-provided AI, whether an ambient scribe or note writing built into the EMR, was bought for the system, not for you. It is typically tuned for scheduled clinic visits and generic notes, not for the multi-patient ED shift or the structured, defensible MDM that emergency medicine documentation hinges on. palmER is built for exactly that: a complete MDM with differential and risk stratification in seconds, plus ambient scribing designed for interrupted, multi-patient work.

There is also the question of what the hospital’s tool keeps. Its retention is set by contract and hospital policy, and retained audio, transcripts, drafts, and inputs are discoverable in litigation. palmER retains nothing: audio is never saved, patient data auto-deletes within 24 hours, and the only lasting record is the note you sign.

And palmER is portable. Your account belongs to you, not your employer, so it goes wherever you practice: the main ED, the community site, the locums shift, your next job. It works alongside any EMR with no integration step, so changing hospitals never means losing your workflow.

• Ambient Scribing: palmER listens during your encounter and writes your HPI and Physical Exam automatically. No audio is ever stored on our servers or sent to any third party.
• MDM Assistant: Paste your full chart and get a complete, defensible MDM note in seconds.
• HPI and Physical Exam Assistants: Enter a brief summary and get comprehensive, complaint-specific notes with pertinent positives and negatives.
• Patient Management: Track patients, switch between encounters, and see documentation status at a glance.
• Chart View: Review HPI, Exam, and MDM on a single screen. Edit inline, refine with follow-up instructions, and copy to your EMR.
• palmEM AI Reference: Ask any emergency medicine question and get instant, evidence-based answers without leaving your workflow.
• Chart CheckER: Run your chart through a quality check before signing. Flags documentation gaps, billing opportunities, and medico-legal vulnerabilities.
• ConsultER: Generate structured consult scripts for specialist communication.
• palmER Colab: Ask clinical questions, generate discharge instructions, and get answers in a side panel that already knows your patient’s case, without interrupting your charting.

Templates give you the same generic text for every patient. Dictation transcribes what you say but doesn’t do anything with it. You still have to organize, structure, and review everything yourself.

palmER is different. With Ambient Scribing, it listens to your encounter and writes your HPI and Exam for you. With the MDM Assistant, you paste in your full chart and get a defensible MDM that captures your clinical reasoning, differential diagnosis, and risk stratification. The AI understands the clinical context of each case and generates documentation specific to your patient’s presentation.

The difference is that palmER does the thinking about documentation structure so you can focus on the clinical thinking.

Ambient scribing built for the ED, not adapted for it. Most ambient scribes were designed for clinic workflows. Scheduled appointments, peaceful office visits, one patient at a time. That falls apart in the emergency department. palmER was built from the ground up by practicing emergency physicians for the way the ED actually works.

palmER listens during your encounter and auto-generates your HPI and Physical Exam before you’re even back at the computer. Paste in your full chart and get a complete, defensible MDM that captures the full complexity of your clinical thinking. Switch between patients instantly. Stop and restart charting as your shift demands without losing context.

Less typing, fewer clicks, and documentation that reflects the care you’re actually providing. No audio is ever stored on our servers or sent to any third party. Speech is transcribed and immediately discarded.