What is AI medical scribe?
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An AI medical scribe is software that listens to a clinical consultation — with the patient's consent — and drafts the documentation: the clinical note, referral letters and patient summaries. The clinician reviews, edits and signs every document; the scribe removes the typing, not the clinical authorship.
Also called an ambient scribe or AI scribe, the technology combines speech recognition with language models that understand clinical structure — so a natural consultation becomes a structured note (SOAP or your own format) rather than a raw transcript. The defining property is that the clinician remains the author: nothing is final until reviewed and approved.
It differs from dictation, where you still compose every sentence yourself after the patient leaves — the scribe drafts from the consultation itself, which is where the time saving comes from. The full comparison, including where dictation still wins, is in AI scribe vs dictation.
UK governance questions to ask any scribe vendor: where audio and notes are processed and stored (expect UK data residency), how quickly audio is deleted (Motics deletes within 48 hours), whether patient data trains models (it shouldn't), and how consent is captured — including for patients who may lack capacity, covered in our consent and capacity entry.