If you run a clinic or a hospital list, you have been pitched an AI scribe, and the pitches sound alike. This guide steps back from the pitch so you can tell a serious tool from a demo.
The short answer
An AI medical scribe listens to a consult and drafts what comes out of it: the progress note, the GP and referrer letters, the discharge summary. The clinician reads the draft, corrects it, and signs. The scribe writes; the doctor decides.
That line is the point, and where a serious tool parts from a novelty. It saves you the typing and the notes that pile up after the last patient without taking the pen from your hand. Nothing it produces is a record until a named clinician has reviewed it and signed it. If a product blurs that line, the time it saves is not worth the risk it adds.
The kinds of scribe
The word scribe covers three different things, and which one you are sold carries different work, different risk and different regulatory weight.
- Ambient Ambient scribes listen to the consult and draft structured documentation from it. You talk to the patient as always, and the note comes from that conversation. This is what most people now mean by AI scribe, and where aurii sits.
- Dictation Dictation tools turn speech into text, more or less verbatim. Older than the current wave, and they transcribe rather than structure: you dictate the note in full and shape it yourself. Speed depends on you knowing what to say.
- Whole-record Whole-record systems sit across the clinical record, pull from results and observations, and sometimes draft and file with little human step between. The more a tool acts on the record itself, the closer it gets to a clinical decision system, with the obligations that brings. Ask where the human sign-off is.
None is inherently better than the others. The question is which matches your work, and how much control it hands back before anything becomes a record.
How it works, plainly
Under the marketing, an ambient scribe is a short pipeline: the consult is captured with consent, speech becomes a transcript, a model drafts the note, the letters and the discharge, and the draft returns to you to correct and sign. Each stage is where a product makes an honest promise: where the audio lives, whether your patients' words train a model, and whether anything can be filed without a signature.
The diagram below is how aurii runs that pipeline. Every stage is a fact about the product, not a slogan: captured and transcribed in Australia, drafted as a draft rather than a record, reviewed and signed by the treating clinician, and written to a tamper-evident audit.
What it is not
An AI scribe drafts documentation. It is not a diagnostician, and a well-built one does not pretend to be. It does not decide what is wrong with the patient, it does not choose the treatment, and it does not sign anything. Those are yours.
It is also not, on its own, a medical device. A tool that drafts a note for a clinician to review and sign is a documentation aid. Software that interprets results or recommends treatment is a different category with its own obligations. aurii is documentation: it is not registered on the ARTG, it is not a medical device, and it is aligned to how Australian clinicians already work rather than replacing any part of your judgement. If a vendor is vague about which side of that line their product sits on, treat the vagueness as the answer.
What to ask before you choose one
Most scribes demo well. The differences that matter show up in the answers to a few plain questions, and a vendor who cannot answer them cleanly is telling you something.
- Where does the audio and the clinical text live, and does it stay in Australia?
- Is my patients' content ever used to train a general-purpose model?
- Can anything be filed, sent or billed without a clinician signing it first?
- Is there a permanent, tamper-evident record of who did what, and for how long is it kept?
- How does the patient consent, and what do I tell them?
The long version is a scoring sheet you can take into a demo, in evaluating an AI scribe. The consent question has its own guide, with wording you can use, in consent for AI scribes, plus a patient explainer to hand over at the bedside.
The Australian regulatory picture
Two bodies of rules matter here, and they are not the same thing. First, device regulation. The Therapeutic Goods Administration regulates software-based medical devices, and whether one is caught turns on what it does: interpreting results or directing treatment is different from drafting a note a clinician then signs. The TGA's guidance sets out where that line falls; read it before accepting a vendor's account of its own product.
The second is privacy. Clinical audio and the documents drafted from it are health information, at the sensitive end of the Australian Privacy Principles under the Privacy Act 1988 (Cth). That governs consent, how it is used, where it can go, and the patient's rights of access and correction. The Office of the Australian Information Commissioner sets these out.
- TGA: regulation of software-based medical devices
- OAIC: the Australian Privacy Principles
- OAIC: health information and your privacy rights
How aurii answers the privacy side, principle by principle, is on the compliance page; the security mechanisms sit on the security page.
Where aurii fits
This section is about our product. Everything above is not.
aurii is an ambient scribe built for specialists rounding in Australian private hospitals. You speak the consult the way you already do, and aurii drafts the progress note, the GP and referrer letters, the discharge summary and the private health fund billing items from that one conversation. You review each and sign. Nothing is filed, sent or billed until you do.
It runs on iOS, Android and the web. Everything is captured, transcribed and stored inside Australia, encrypted record by record, with a seven-year tamper-evident audit of who did what. Black Shard, behind aurii, holds SMB1001:2026 Gold certification. Letters can be delivered with tracking, and inbound HL7 acknowledgements confirm when a document has landed. Below, the shape of what it drafts, on a synthetic patient:
To size what documentation time is costing you, the time-back calculator uses your own numbers. Pricing is A$199 + GST per clinician per month, set out on the pricing page. The wider product tour is on the product page, and how we think about clinical safety is on the safety page.
Common questions
A documentation tool that drafts notes for a clinician to review and sign is not the same thing as software that diagnoses or directs treatment. aurii drafts documentation. It does not make clinical decisions, and it is not registered on the ARTG as a medical device. Where a product claims to interpret results or recommend treatment, that is a different category with its own regulatory obligations, and you should ask the vendor to be specific about which one they are in.
Yes. Recording a consult and drafting from it is something the patient should know about and agree to. It folds easily into how you already open a consult. We set out how, with wording you can use, in the consent guide, and there is a plain-language patient explainer you can hand over.
With aurii, the consult is captured and transcribed in Australia, and the documents drafted from it are stored and encrypted here (Sydney primary, Melbourne backup). Audio retention follows the configuration agreed with your hospital. The mechanism is on the security page.
No. aurii produces a draft. Nothing is filed, sent or billed until a named clinician reviews and signs it. The scribe writes; the doctor decides.
More guides sit on the resources hub. If your practice needs a question answered before it adopts AI documentation, tell us and we will write it: hello@aurii.com.au.