🤖 Empathia vs. Other AI Medical Scribes: What Sets Us Apart
By: Empathia Editorial Team
May 15, 2025
In today’s market, there’s no shortage of AI tools promising to help clinicians chart faster and reduce documentation time. But most solutions focus on convenience over clinical nuance, and few are built to truly support the complexity of real practice, especially in specialty medicine.
At Empathia, we believe an AI medical scribe should do more than transcribe. It should adapt to your style, understand your clinical context, and provide meaningful support for complex encounters. Here’s how we stack up against other AI scribes and why more physicians are switching to Empathia.
🩺 First, What Is an AI Medical Scribe?
An AI medical scribe is a software tool that listens to or transcribes a clinical encounter and generates a structured medical note. This might include:
SOAP notes
Consult summaries
Referrals
Patient instructions
ICD-9 or CPT coding suggestions
Some scribes are built into the EMR. Others operate independently and generate notes that can be reviewed, copied, and pasted. The best ones reduce charting time without losing note quality.
But they’re not all created equal.
🔍 Side-by-Side Comparison
Feature | Empathia | Other AI Scribes |
|---|---|---|
Localized onboarding | ✅ Real human team in Canada & U.S. | ❌ Offshore or email-only |
Built for specialists | ✅ ENT, psych, plastics, cardiology, etc. | ⚠️ Often family med–only focus |
Customization tools | ✅ Smart Style, note format editing | ⚠️ Rigid or hard to configure |
Live feedback loop | ✅ Physician-driven product roadmap | ❌ Seldom user-responsive |
Secure & compliant | ✅ HIPAA + PIPEDA, data privacy focused | ❓ Varies—ask carefully |
Works across settings | ✅ In-person, telehealth, asynchronous | ⚠️ Often real-time only or restricted to EMR add-on |
Cost model | Transparent, scalable | Often volume-based or per-user upcharges |
👥 1. Human Support Teams—Wherever You Practice
We don’t just give you a login and a help link.
Empathia includes:
Onboarding calls tailored to your specialty
Real-time support via chat or call (in your time zone)
Ongoing optimization with a human point of contact
In person demos and lunch and learns
If your workflow changes or you’re onboarding a new clinic site, we’re there—without needing to escalate a support ticket overseas.
🧠 2. Designed for Specialists and Complex Encounters
Most AI scribes on the market today were built with basic visits in mind: 10-minute wellness checkups, cough-and-cold visits, single-issue follow-ups. But real practice, especially specialty practice, isn’t that simple.
Empathia was built with:
Family med, psychiatry, ENT, plastic surgery, cardiology and more in mind
Templates tailored to your encounter types
Voice prompts that reflect your specialty vocabulary
Whether you're managing differentials, multi-symptom visits, medication appeals, or detailed post-ops, Empathia adjusts, not oversimplifies.
📝 3. Superior Note Quality That Learns from You
Every physician has a documentation style. Some use structured bullet points, some prefer flowing prose, some speak in shorthand. Empathia respects your voice and captures it accurately with tools like:
Smart Style: Learns from your edits to improve notes over time
Template Customization: Build or adapt note formats to match your specialty’s style
Instruction-based customization: Add preferences like “bold diagnosis line” or “start Plan section with To-Do list”
Other tools may transcribe well, but they don’t learn you. With Empathia, you don’t have to re-edit the same thing twice.
🔄 4. We Actually Respond to Feedback—Fast
When you submit a request through most SaaS scribes, it’s routed through layers of support, product, and development, often with no visibility or resolution. At Empathia, we’re different.
We build based on clinician feedback every single week.
Examples of features developed from direct requests:
Smart AVS summaries
Multi-speaker mode for shared appointments
Referral letter formatting by specialty
Voice AI intake for patient-completed questionnaires
Our promise? If you tell us what’s not working, we’ll fix it or build around it.
🔒 5. Built for Privacy, Trust, and Transparency
We’re fully HIPAA and PIPEDA compliant, and we:
Never offshore sensitive note data
Offer customizable privacy and deletion settings
Use encrypted, secure infrastructure that scales with clinic size
Provide transparent opt-in for usage-based data learning (i.e., Smart Style)
We work with clinics in both the U.S. and Canada, and our system is reviewed regularly for compliance with local and national privacy regulations.
🧾 Want Real-World Use Cases?
A rural ENT surgeon uses Empathia to complete SOAP notes, generate bilingual handouts, and document nasolaryngoscopies—all before the next patient is in the room.
A psychiatrist uses Smart Style to format therapy notes by time stamp and symptom focus, preserving narrative tone but saving 15+ hours per week.
A plastic surgeon runs consults and post-ops through Empathia, then generates tailored referral letters for anesthesia and surgical planning—all in one session.
🎯 Final Thoughts: Choose the Scribe That’s Built for Your Practice
Empathia isn’t just fast. It’s built to be:
Flexible
Clinically accurate
Supportive of specialist workflows
Aligned with your documentation style
Backed by real humans, not bots or portals
You shouldn’t have to choose between speed and nuance. Empathia gives you both, without the tradeoff.
🚀 Ready to See the Difference?
🧠 Try the AI scribe that understands real practice.
