For doctors
Patient audio.
In the room. Not the cloud.
Mac Note Taker captures the consult on the Mac sitting on the desk. Transcription and summarization run on Apple Silicon. The recording does not travel through a cloud transcription vendor before you get to read it.
We do not sell ourselves as a HIPAA-certified medical device. We remove the cloud transcription vendor from your data flow. Compliance is your call to make with your privacy officer.
The problem
Why doctors do not want a cloud notetaker in the consult.
A patient sitting across from you does not want a bot named "Otter Notetaker" in their Zoom call. A telehealth platform with a Business Associate Agreement does not want a brand-new processor uploading PHI to a different cloud. Mac Note Taker stays out of that diagram entirely.
- Cloud notetakers store PHI in a vendor tenant. Now every audit and breach question lands on a new third party.
- BAA negotiations slow you down. Most cloud notetakers will not sign one, or charge enterprise pricing if they will.
- Patients can see the bot in the call. That conversation is not the one you wanted to have.
- Hospital IT and locum laptops change often. A per-seat cloud subscription does not survive that.
Privacy posture
What "on-device" means in a clinical workflow.
Mac Note Taker is not a medical device, and we make no claim about HIPAA certification. We do hold the data path as short as possible. That is a meaningfully easier story to tell your privacy officer than a cloud notetaker.
Audio stays on the Mac
WAV file lands in the local SwiftData store. No upload, no telemetry of the audio.
ASR runs on Apple Silicon
Parakeet or Whisper on the Neural Engine. The Mac never ships the audio to a cloud transcription API by default.
Summaries optional
Use a local Ollama model and the transcript also stays on the device. Or skip summaries entirely and keep only the transcript.
Bring-your-own export
Markdown / JSON / text into your EMR system or a secured drive. We do not host the file.
In practice
What doctors use it for.
Patient consults
- Mic on the desk captures both clinician and patient.
- Speaker labels distinguish you from the patient automatically.
- Markdown summary makes the chart note quicker to draft.
Telehealth visits
- System audio capture grabs the remote side without a bot in the call.
- Patient never sees a third-party notetaker join.
- Audio file is named by date so it slots into your EMR upload step.
Case conferences
- Multi-clinician rounds diarized into one transcript.
- Action items per speaker, so follow-ups are tracked.
- Voice fingerprints recognize the same colleague across cases.
Side by side
Cloud notetaker vs Mac Note Taker for clinicians.
| Concern | Cloud notetaker | Mac Note Taker |
|---|---|---|
| PHI leaves your device | Yes, uploaded to vendor | No, stays on the Mac |
| BAA needed with the notetaker | Yes, often enterprise tier | Not applicable - no audio reaches us |
| Bot visible to the patient | Yes | No |
| Per-seat subscription | $15-40 / user / month | $149 lifetime, 3 Macs |
| Works offline / on a poor link | No | Yes - ASR is local |
We make no HIPAA claims. We just remove a cloud processor from your data flow.
A notetaker your privacy officer will not flag.
$149 lifetime - 3 Macs - first 100 buyers use code FOUDNER for $79.