AI Scribe Selection and Setup for Clinical Notes

Clinical documentation is the hour-thief in any therapy or physio practice. OTs, SLPs, ABA therapists, and physiotherapists in BC routinely spend 20-40 minutes per session note, writing from memory after a back-to-back schedule has blurred the morning’s details. The quality drops, the evenings disappear, and the notes that underpin clinical decisions and funder reports grow vague. AI scribe tools replace that process with a review-and-approve model: audio captured in the room, structured draft generated immediately, five to ten minutes to review and sign.

These scribe tools run entirely inside your practice’s own systems. Makeomatic does not process session audio, clinical notes, or any treatment data — we help you evaluate the right scribe for your discipline and caseload, configure it to match your documentation standards, and train your team to use it effectively.

What we do (and what we don’t)

Makeomatic’s role in this workflow is advisory and hands-off with respect to clinical content:

• Evaluate which scribe tool fits your discipline, caseload mix, and insurer requirements
• Configure note templates, prompt settings, and recording workflows during a guided setup session with your team
• Train clinicians on the review-and-approve workflow so draft notes are treated as starting points, not finished documentation
• Optimize template wording and prompt tuning after the first week of use, based on your team’s feedback about output quality

We do not access, process, store, or handle session audio, clinical notes, chart entries, or any patient health information at any point. The scribe runs in your clinician’s account, on your clinician’s device, inside your practice’s existing systems.

The tools worth evaluating

Jane AI Scribe ($15/clinician/month) is the primary option for most clinics already on Jane App. It runs inside Jane under the clinician’s own account — no separate vendor login, no data leaving the Jane environment, and no integration to build or break. It is PIPEDA and PHIPA compliant with Canadian data residency, which satisfies BC PIPA requirements. For chart notes across OT, SLP, and physiotherapy visits, it covers the full range.

Heidi Health ($99/month, Canadian data residency, ISO 27001 and SOC 2 Type II certified) fills a gap Jane Scribe leaves open. Jane’s scribe is optimised for chart notes; Heidi is purpose-built for the narrative-heavy report formats that ICBC adjusters and WorkSafeBC reviewers expect. It also carries the only mainstream ABA session template available in a Canadian-hosted scribe, making it the better primary tool for ABA practices. Running both costs less per month than an hour of documentation time.

Scribeberry is a viable entry-level option for solo practitioners who want to test the category before committing. It is a Canadian company, PIPEDA compliant, and offers a free tier.

How your team sets it up

Jane AI Scribe requires no external integration. Your clinic enables it inside your existing Jane account, configures the note template to match your documentation style (SOAP, DAP, or free narrative), and begins recording sessions through the Jane interface on a phone or tablet. The audio never leaves Jane’s servers. After the session ends, the draft note appears in the chart for review; the clinician edits and signs before the next patient. The data flow is entirely within Jane: clinician device to Jane (Canadian-hosted) to the signed chart entry. Nothing else touches PHI.

Heidi Health sits alongside Jane rather than replacing it. The clinician records through the Heidi app on a phone, selects the report template (ICBC progress, WorkSafeBC functional summary, ABA session note), and Heidi generates the draft. That draft is then copied into the Jane chart or attached as a document, depending on your clinic’s charting protocol. The connection between Heidi and Jane is manual by design: Heidi has no Jane API integration, which is appropriate given the sensitivity of the output. The data flow is: clinician device to Heidi (Canadian-hosted) to a draft document to the Jane chart via clinician review.

No automation middleware (n8n, Zapier, or otherwise) sits in this workflow. PHI does not transit any third-party system between the scribe and the chart.

Compliance considerations we help you assess

Jane AI Scribe meets the BC standard. Data resides in Canada, Jane’s BAA is available, and the tool runs entirely within the Jane tenant the clinician already controls. It satisfies PIPEDA, BC PIPA, and PHIPA.

Heidi Health has confirmed Canadian data residency and holds ISO 27001 and SOC 2 Type II certifications. Its DPA is available on request and covers PHI handling explicitly.

Scribeberry is Canadian-built and PIPEDA compliant. It suits lower-volume solo practices where the cost of Heidi is disproportionate.

Don’t use Freed or Abridge for BC clinical work. Both are US-hosted with no confirmed Canadian data residency, and routing session audio through either breaks PIPEDA and BC PIPA. Don’t use AutoNotes at all — their ToS explicitly forbids uploading PHI, so clinical use is a contract breach no matter where the data sits.

The Canada Health Infoway AI Scribe Program (10,000 funded licenses) only covers physicians, so OTs, SLPs, ABA therapists, and physios pay commercial pricing.

Common pitfalls we help you avoid

• Recording quality degrades with background noise. We recommend a clip-on lapel microphone on the clinician’s phone — it eliminates most transcription errors for a $20 fix.
• Default prompts produce generic SOAP structures that don’t match your clinic’s charting conventions. During setup, we guide your team through customising the template before doing real sessions.
• Skipping review is the single fastest way to introduce clinical errors into the record. We structure the rollout so review-and-approve is enforced from day one, not treated as optional.
• Jane Scribe’s ABA template is limited. ABA practices that try to make the default template work for behavioural session notes will spend more time editing than writing. We steer ABA practices toward Heidi for documentation from the outset.
• Insurer report drafts from Heidi still require substantive clinical editing. The tool structures the output; the clinician supplies the clinical reasoning. We set expectations during training so no one treats a Heidi draft as final without review.

When this is worth the setup

This workflow pays for itself at one clinician seeing six or more patients per day, regardless of discipline. If documentation is currently taking 20 minutes or more per note and notes are routinely finished after clinic hours, the time recapture is immediate. For practices with ICBC or WorkSafeBC billing, adding Heidi reduces the time spent on insurer reports enough to justify the $99/month on volume alone. Solo practitioners can start with Jane Scribe and add Heidi if they carry insurer caseload. Multi-clinician practices should enable Jane Scribe for all clinicians from the outset; the per-seat cost is low enough that the ROI is positive within the first week.