For clinicians. The consultation does not need a second home.
Ward rounds, home visits, handovers, the four minutes of dictation between patients. Health data is the most heavily regulated category there is, and the fastest way to stop worrying about where it went is for it not to go anywhere.
Use it forDictation between patients, ward rounds, home visits, and multidisciplinary meetings.
The argumentA supplier that never receives patient data is not a processor and not a business associate, so there is nothing to sign.
Not forAnything that must land in the record automatically, structured clinical documentation, or live captioning for a deaf patient.
Most clinical dictation already exists. It is just happening into a hospital system, a secretary's inbox, or nothing at all.
01Dictation between patients
The gap between one patient leaving and the next arriving is where the note gets written, or does not. Speaking for ninety seconds is faster than typing for five minutes, and the difference compounds across a clinic list of twenty.
This is dictation of your own words about a patient, not a recording of the patient, which is a lower bar in most governance policies and worth keeping distinct.
In the app: record, transcribe on the device, then summarise into key points and action items with a local model. Copy the text into the patient record and delete the recording.
02Ward rounds and handovers
A round is a fast-moving multi-person conversation in a corridor with terrible acoustics, and the notes made afterwards are reconstructions. A handover is worse, because it happens exactly when everyone is tired.
Speaker labels matter here more than anywhere. Who said the plan is not a detail.
In the app: save each regular colleague's voice once and transcripts come back attributed. Audio enhancement lifts quiet voices and cuts corridor rumble before the model sees it, and it is reversible if it makes things worse.
03Home visits and community work
A district nurse, a GP on a home visit, a paramedic in a stairwell. Rural signal is unreliable, building interiors are worse, and the notes are needed before the next call, not when the phone finds a bar.
In the app: there is no connection to lose. Everything runs on the device, and the Apple Watch or CarPlay lets you start a recording between the door and the car without unlocking anything.
04Multidisciplinary meetings
Eight people, forty patients, ninety minutes, and one set of minutes everyone will rely on for the next fortnight. These are highly sensitive by construction: several patients' data in one room at once.
In the app: transcribe locally, then use the summary to pull out decisions and action items. Nothing about forty patients travels anywhere to become a document.
05A patient consultation, with consent
Patients increasingly want a record of what was said, and giving them one is good practice in several specialties. It is also a recording of a patient by a clinician, so it needs consent, a documented reason, and a clear answer about where it lives.
Only one of those three is hard when the answer is on this phone and nowhere else.
In the app: use Advanced Privacy: the audio is erased as soon as the transcript exists and the session clears itself when you leave. The patient gets the text, nobody keeps the tape.
Patient audio is the most regulated data you will handle all day
A recording of a consultation is health data about an identifiable person, and in Europe that lands in the special category under Article 9 of the GDPR: prohibited by default, permitted only on a specific ground, and expected to carry extra safeguards. In the United States the same recording is protected health information under HIPAA the moment it is created in the course of care.
So the question worth asking about a transcription app is less how good its model is than whether using it hands patient data to a company that becomes, legally, part of your care chain.
What a cloud tool asks of you
Upload the audio and the vendor becomes a processor under the GDPR, or a business associate under HIPAA. That means a signed agreement, a security review, a sub-processor list, a retention schedule, a record in your processing register, and a transfer assessment if the servers are outside your jurisdiction.
All of that is doable, and hospitals do it every day for the systems they run centrally. It is a great deal of paperwork for a voice memo on a ward round, which is why most clinicians simply do not record at all.
What Just Transcribe asks of you
Nothing, because it receives nothing. The speech model runs on the phone, the audio never leaves it, and a supplier who never receives patient data is not a processor and not a business associate. There is no agreement to sign because there is no processing to agree about.
The App Store privacy label reads Data Not Collected. It connects twice in its life: once to fetch a model you chose, once for the payment.
That removes the vendor from the picture. It does not remove you from it. The recording is still patient data, it is still on a device in your pocket, and every rule about how you handle patient data still applies, including the ones your trust or practice wrote itself.
Why Just Transcribe
The argument is mostly about what is absent.
✓No processor, no business associate. The tool never receives patient data, so it does not enter your care chain and there is nothing to contract about.
✓No account and no cloud identity. Nothing to log into on a shared device, nothing to leave logged in, and no credential to reset when somebody leaves.
✓Works where hospitals do not have signal. Basements, lift shafts, shielded rooms, rural roads. Offline is the normal mode, not a degraded one.
✓Advanced Privacy for the recording you do not want to keep. Audio erased as soon as the text exists, session wiped on leaving the screen.
✓Fifty-nine transcription languages plus detection. Useful in a clinic where a third of consultations are not in the local language, and Omnilingual reaches more than 1,600, with uneven quality in the rarest.
✓Local summaries. Bullets, key points and action items generated on the device, so the summary is not a second upload.
✓One payment, no seat licence. EUR 9.99 once. You do not need a purchase order to try it on your own phone.
A supplier that never receives protected health information is not a business associate, and a tool that never transfers personal data needs no Article 28 agreement.
Which is not the same as saying your employer will approve it, so ask them. It only makes the conversation a short one.
The rules, in outline
General shapes, not advice, and certainly not a compliance certification. There is no such thing as a HIPAA certified app; there are only covered entities and their agreements.
Orientation only. Your employer decides, advised by its data protection officer, not this table.
GDPR Article 9
Health data is a special category: processing is prohibited unless a specific condition applies, and extra safeguards are expected. Keeping the data on one device you already control is one of the cheaper safeguards.
GDPR Article 28
A processor needs a written contract. A supplier that receives nothing is not a processor, so there is no contract for this step. Your device management and storage arrangements are still yours.
GDPR Chapter V
No transfer out of the device means no international transfer to assess, which is the part that has been repeatedly unsettled since Schrems II in 2020.
HIPAA business associate rule
A vendor that creates, receives, maintains or transmits protected health information on your behalf needs a business associate agreement. One that never touches it does not meet the definition.
Professional secrecy
Medical confidentiality in most countries predates data protection law and is stricter. Where the two differ, the professional duty is usually the binding one.
Recording a patient
Needs consent, a documented purpose and a retention answer, and your employer may forbid it entirely on their devices. None of that changes because the app is offline.
What the app does is documented on the fact sheet. What you are allowed to do is documented by your employer.
What to put to information governance
The speech model runs on the device. No audio or transcript is transmitted to the developer or any third party, and the App Store privacy label reads Data Not Collected. It is not a medical device and has no clinical validation, so I would use it for my own dictation, which I paste into the record and then delete. I can demonstrate the offline behaviour in airplane mode.
Four sentences and a demonstration usually ends the conversation. Have it before the first patient, not after.
Before the first shift
Four decisions, then it is out of your way.
Ask information governance first, not after. Show them that the app declares Data Not Collected and runs the model locally. The conversation is usually short, and having it before you record a patient is considerably shorter than having it afterwards.
Download a model on hospital wifi, once. Twenty-one to pick from, roughly 75 MB to 7 GB, and four questions in the app narrow it down. Larger models handle accents and medical vocabulary better. After that first download it never needs a network again.
Decide your two modes. Ordinary recording for your own dictation, which you may want to replay. Advanced Privacy for anything with a patient's voice on it, which erases the audio as soon as the text exists.
Fix the route into the patient record. Export as text or PDF, paste or attach into the record, then delete from the app. The app is a notebook on the way to the record, not the record itself.
Device security is doing the heavy lifting here. Passcode, Face ID, automatic lock, encryption and remote wipe, and if it is a trust-managed device then whatever the MDM policy says. A phone with patient audio on it is a clinical record in your pocket.
Where Just Transcribe is the wrong tool in a hospital
Plainly, because getting this wrong in healthcare is worse than getting it wrong anywhere else on this site.
×Not a medical device and not clinically validated. No regulatory clearance, no accuracy claim for clinical documentation, no safety case. It is a recorder with a speech model.
×No integration with any EHR. Nothing writes into Epic, Cerner, HiX, or anything else. Getting text into the record is copy, paste or attach, by hand.
×No ambient clinical documentation. It does not structure a consultation into SOAP notes, suggest codes, or fill fields. Those products exist, they are good, and they all upload.
×No live captions. Transcription happens after the recording, so it cannot support a deaf patient in real time during the consultation.
×No audit trail. No access log, no record of who opened what, which some governance policies require for anything holding patient data.
×No shared access. A colleague covering your list cannot see your transcripts. There is no sync and no team account.
If you need structured clinical documentation that lands in the record automatically, buy one of the ambient scribe products and put the agreement in place. This app is for the notes that currently exist only in your head on the drive home.
Straight answers
Is it HIPAA compliant?
No app is, on its own. HIPAA applies to covered entities and their business associates, not to software in the abstract. The relevant point is narrower: because the app never receives protected health information, it does not meet the definition of a business associate, so there is no agreement to sign. Whether your organisation permits recording on a phone at all is a separate question and theirs to answer.
Can I use it for patient consultations in Europe?
The app not uploading is the easy half. The hard half is Article 9: you still need a lawful basis, patient consent in most settings, a documented purpose and a retention answer, and your employer may simply forbid recording on personal devices. What the app removes is the transfer and the processor agreement, not the clinical governance.
Does it understand medical terminology?
Partly. These are general speech models, so common clinical vocabulary comes through reasonably and drug names, dosages and abbreviations are the weak spot. Pick one of the larger models, check dosages by eye every time, and use find and replace for the terms it consistently mishears. Never paste an unchecked transcript containing a dose into a record.
Can I prove to my governance team that it stays on the device?
Better than prove: demonstrate. Download a model on wifi, switch the phone to airplane mode, record and transcribe. Text with the radios off means the model ran locally. Pair that with the App Store privacy label reading Data Not Collected and the detail on the fact sheet.
What about the recordings already on my phone?
Import them. It reads wav, mp3, m4a, aiff and more, and transcribes locally, so an existing pile of voice memos does not have to go through a web uploader to become text. Delete them afterwards; the app is not an archive and should not become one.
Next
Download it, fetch the smallest model on wifi, then turn the phone to airplane mode and dictate a note about a fictional patient. If the text appears with the radios off, you have seen the only claim on this page that matters, and you can take that to your governance team instead of a brochure.
Written by the developer, and not medical or legal advice. I make Just Transcribe. It is not a clinical tool, not a medical device, and makes no claim to be validated for clinical documentation. Your employer decides what you may record and where it may live, advised by its data protection officer, and that answer outranks this page.
Written 26 September 2026, updated 3 October 2026 for Just Transcribe 1.36. Numbers and sources on the fact sheet.
