Mac-native medical dictation
Your dictation. Your vendors. Your Mac.
DirectScribe turns your spoken notes into your own templates — the template molds to how you dictate, not the other way around — ready to paste into your EMR, using the transcription and intelligence vendors you choose, with the keys and the files kept on your Mac.
For doctors in private practice across Canada — running their own clinic and EMR, not hospitals or hospital-based clinics. You dictate into your mic — DirectScribe captures only the physician's voice, not an ambient recording of the room.
SUBJECTIVE
52M, follow-up for hypertension. Feeling well, no chest pain or dyspnea. Adherent to amlodipine.
OBJECTIVE
BP [BLOOD PRESSURE], HR 72, regular. Chest clear.
ASSESSMENT
Hypertension, adequately controlled.
PLAN
Continue current dose. Recheck in 3 months. Labs ordered.
What it does
A quiet tool that does one job well
Dictate the visit, shape it into your note, paste it into your EMR. No ambient recording, no lock-in, no server holding your patients' data.
Dictate to your template
Speak the encounter in your own words — DirectScribe molds your free-form dictation into your SOAP note, periodic health exam, or referral letter, not the other way around. Then you review and paste it into your EMR.
Bring your own vendors
Choose your transcription and intelligence vendors and pay them directly — no per-seat markup like bundled AI scribes charge. Your API keys live in the macOS Keychain — there is no DirectScribe account and no DirectScribe server.
Retention on your schedule
Keep notes for 7, 30, or 90 days — or clear a whole session the moment it is safely in your EMR. Every deletion is recorded.
A transparency log
Every send to a vendor and every deletion is written to a tamper-evident, PHI-free log you can show a privacy reviewer.
Built by a physician
Designed by a practising physician for the realities of a solo private-practice clinic — not by a hospital IT department for one.
Subscribe through the App Store
DirectScribe is distributed on the Mac App Store — Apple handles billing and your subscription. There is no DirectScribe account, and entitlement checks happen on your Mac.
Precise about locality
What runs where
We describe "local-first" precisely. Your files, templates, keys, and transparency log live on your Mac. But at launch, turning speech into text always uses a cloud transcription vendor you choose — so we say so plainly instead of implying that your audio is processed only on your Mac.
The one step that can run entirely on your Mac today is note-shaping — natively with Apple Intelligence (on-device), or with a local model via LM Studio.
| Step | Runs |
|---|---|
| Recording your voice | On your Mac |
| Transcription (speech → text) | Your chosen cloud vendor |
| Note-shaping (text → your template) | Your chosen vendor — or fully on-device with Apple Intelligence or LM Studio |
| Templates, keys, notes, transparency log | On your Mac |
Built to outlast your EMR
Speech-to-text and AI move faster than EMRs ever will
EMRs are data repositories for clinical care — not places where cutting-edge transcription or language models show up first. DirectScribe stays deliberately separate from your EMR: dictate, review, paste. That gap is the point.
Your vendors evolve. DirectScribe doesn't lock you to any of them.
When a better or cheaper transcription or intelligence vendor arrives, you switch providers in Settings — no waiting on your EMR vendor to catch up, no migration.
Your EMR stays the system of record — not a bottleneck.
The finished note pastes in as plain text. Your EMR keeps doing what it's good at: being the durable record of clinical care, while DirectScribe stays free to move as fast as the AI landscape does.
Security by design
The design is the security story
Not a bolt-on. The product is shaped so that the sensitive data has nowhere unexpected to go.
- Your dictation, not the room You dictate into your mic and DirectScribe captures your voice. It isn't an ambient scribe — there's no microphone left open on the visit.
- No DirectScribe servers Your PHI never touches our servers, because there are none. You send it straight to the vendors you chose.
- Keys in the macOS Keychain API keys are stored by the system Keychain, never in plain files and never in the cloud.
- Sandboxed app DirectScribe runs in the macOS App Sandbox with least-privilege access to your system.
- Deletion on your schedule Session-end and 7/30/90-day sweeps remove recordings, transcripts, and notes on the schedule you set.
- Tamper-evident transparency log A hash-chained, sequence-checkpointed record of every transmission and deletion — PHI-free by design.
- App Store subscription Distributed on the Mac App Store; Apple manages billing. No DirectScribe account, and entitlement checks happen on your Mac.
Deletion, stated honestly
Deleted means deleted from the file system on your schedule; FileVault protects residual storage; backups you configure may retain copies. We don't claim data disappears from every disk — we tell you exactly what deletion does, and the transparency log proves the action.
Coming soon to the Mac App Store
DirectScribe is heading to the Mac App Store with a 7-day free trial. Work through the setup checklist — vendor API keys and (optionally) Dropbox template sync — so you're ready the moment it's live, and tell us below if you'd like to know when that is.