Transcription gives you words. This gives you the note.
A medical transcription service returns a document you still have to turn into a clinical record. NissiHealth listens to the consultation and returns the SOAP note, the prescription, the sick note, the patient instructions and the ICD-10 codes — drafted, for you to check and sign.
What runs on the recording
Two models, each doing the job it is good at. The speech model hears the consultation; the language model writes the record.
Deepgram nova-3-medical
The speech model is the medical variant, so drug names and clinical terms are transcribed as terms rather than guessed phonetically.
Claude Opus 4.5 writes the note
The transcript is structured into subjective, objective, assessment and plan. Every section is a draft until you sign it.
ICD-10 codes for medical aid
Diagnosis codes are suggested in the format South African medical aid billing expects, from the same recording.
Built against South African rules
An offshore transcription service can type what was said. It cannot code for medical aid, print a Regulation 33 script, or tell you where the audio is stored.
Audio stays in af-south-1
Recordings and documents are stored in the AWS Cape Town region. Telehealth media rooms default to the same region.
AES-256-GCM at rest
Transcript segments and note bodies are encrypted field-by-field. Audio is deleted on a retention schedule, 90 days by default.
Consent before the first chunk
A database trigger refuses to store audio without a recording consent event against the session. It is not a checkbox in the interface.
HPCSA Booklet 9 audit trail
Who accessed what, when, and what changed — recorded against the encounter for the retention period the guideline requires.
Regulation 33 prescriptions
Scripts carry the particulars GN R.859/2017 requires, with a wet-ink signature block and a QR code for pharmacy verification.
English consultations today
The live scribe transcribes English. Support for more South African languages is on the roadmap, not in the product yet.
If you are comparing this to a transcription service
A medical transcription service takes a dictation or a recording and returns text, usually within a few hours and usually typed by a person. The text is accurate and it is yours, but it is still prose. Someone in the practice then reads it, decides what belongs in subjective and what belongs in assessment, writes the script, fills in the certificate, and looks up the codes. The typing was never the slow part.
A scribe does that second job. The recording produces a structured note with the sections already separated, a prescription with the legal particulars already on it, a certificate with the practice letterhead already applied, and diagnosis codes already suggested. What arrives on your screen is a set of documents to check, not a page to process.
The trade is that a draft can be wrong in ways a transcript cannot. A transcript can mishear a word; a draft can structure a consultation in a way you disagree with. That is why nothing is signed automatically, why the AI-written sections are flagged as needing review before an encounter can be completed, and why the transcript stays attached to the note so you can check any line against what was said.
If what you need is a verbatim record of dictation for someone else to work from, a transcription service is the simpler tool. If what you need is the consultation written up, coded and ready to sign before the patient reaches reception, that is this.
What it does not do
It does not sign anything. Every note, script and certificate is a draft until a registered practitioner reviews and signs it, and the audit trail records who did.
It does not decide. Diagnosis codes are suggestions against what was said in the room, and the assessment is yours to correct before it becomes the record.
It does not keep your audio indefinitely. Recordings are purged on a retention schedule; the transcript and the signed note are the clinical record and are kept for the period the HPCSA requires.
It does not replace your billing system. NissiHealth produces the clinical record and the codes that go with it, and runs alongside whatever you already submit claims through.
See it on one of your own consults
Bring a real, anonymised consultation to the demo. We will record it and show you the note, the script and the codes that come out the other side.