Important: This article is written for informational purposes. For clinical documentation involving PHI, verify HIPAA compliance with your compliance officer before deploying any cloud-based tool. AiType does not process PHI by design and does not provide a HIPAA BAA.
Physicians spend an average of 2 hours per day on documentation — the highest proportion of any profession. EHR systems like Epic and Cerner have improved but haven't solved the core problem: entering structured data by voice in real time. Here's the state of medical dictation in 2026.
The medical dictation landscape
Dragon Medical One (Nuance/Microsoft)
The gold standard for clinical documentation. Deep EHR integration with Epic, Cerner, and most major platforms. HIPAA BAA available. Medical-grade vocabulary trained on clinical speech. Requires voice profile setup. ~$99/month per provider. Available on Windows and iOS. The integration with ambient clinical intelligence (ACI) — where it listens to the patient encounter and auto-structures the note — is genuinely transformative but enterprise-only.
Suki
AI-native ambient clinical documentation. Listens to the encounter and structures notes automatically. Growing adoption in US health systems. More expensive than Dragon at $300–$400/month per provider but significantly reduces documentation burden. Still primarily US-market.
Nuance DAX Express
Microsoft's ambient AI documentation product integrated into Epic. Available via Azure. HIPAA-compliant. Very expensive, enterprise deployment only.
AiType — for non-PHI clinical tasks
AiType is not a medical documentation system and doesn't have EHR integration. It does not process PHI. Where it's useful for doctors:
- Personal notes and research (nothing patient-identifying)
- Emails to colleagues, administrators, and journals
- Referral letters and professional correspondence
- Medical education content (lectures, papers, blog posts)
- Administrative documentation not covered by HIPAA
- Personal productivity outside the clinical workflow
A surgeon in Houston uses AiType for all personal correspondence and research notes: "I replaced Dragon for everything outside of patient notes. AiType is faster, works on my Mac and iPhone, and I don't have to maintain a Dragon voice profile."
The right tool by use case
| Use case | Recommended tool |
|---|---|
| EHR documentation with PHI | Dragon Medical One / Suki / Nuance DAX |
| Referral letters and admin emails | AiType or Dragon Medical One |
| Research notes and papers | AiType (no PHI) |
| Patient encounter note capture | Dragon Medical One / Suki |
| Medical education content | AiType |
| Personal productivity (non-clinical) | AiType |
HIPAA compliance considerations
Any tool used to document PHI must comply with HIPAA. This requires a Business Associate Agreement (BAA) with the vendor. Dragon Medical One and Suki both offer BAAs. AiType does not offer a BAA because it is not designed for PHI processing — audio is processed in memory and discarded, but Groq (the transcription backend) is a sub-processor that would need to be covered for PHI use.
Bottom line: Do not use AiType for patient documentation. Use it for everything else.
Mobile medical dictation
Dragon Medical One has iOS integration with specific supported apps. AiType's iOS keyboard works everywhere — including non-EHR apps on your phone (email, notes, medical education apps). For doctors who want fast dictation on their personal phone for non-clinical tasks, AiType is the better mobile experience.
Recommendation
For clinical documentation with EHR integration and PHI: Dragon Medical One or Suki are the right tools. For everything else in a doctor's day — emails, personal notes, research, teaching, correspondence — AiType is faster, cheaper, and cross-platform. Many physicians use both.
Also read: Best dictation app for lawyers · On-device vs cloud dictation: privacy tradeoffs · AiType vs Dragon comparison
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