How long does dictating a SOAP note take with Parakeety?

Two to three minutes for a typical primary-care consultation note, including the subjective and objective sections, assessment and plan. Faster than typing for most people; the time you save adds up across a clinic. The transcription itself is essentially instant once you release the push-to-talk key.

Does Parakeety understand medical terminology?

Parakeet TDT v3 is a general-purpose speech model and handles common clinical vocabulary, including drug names, anatomical terms and procedure language, well enough that most consultations dictate cleanly. Expect occasional manual correction for very specialised terms or unusual brand-name drugs; the same caveat applies to every general-purpose speech model.

Is dictating PHI with Parakeety safe under HIPAA and NHS information governance?

Audio is captured to memory, transcribed on the Apple Neural Engine and discarded; it never leaves the Mac. There is no Protected Health Information being disclosed to a third party, so the rules HIPAA places on business associates do not engage for the audio path. NHS information governance treats third-party processing similarly; on-device transcription removes the third party. The cornerstone piece on architectural vs contractual privacy unpacks this in full.

Can I use the same workflow for DAP or BIRP notes?

Yes. The structure changes but the dictation pattern does not. Replace the four SOAP headings with the headings your discipline uses (DAP: Data, Assessment, Plan; BIRP: Behaviour, Intervention, Response, Plan), dictate the body of each section, edit briefly. Set up your template as a TextExpander snippet or built-in macOS Text Replacement.

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Dictating clinical notes with a SOAP template

SOAP is the most common note structure in primary care, mental health and allied health practice. It is also the structure that maps most cleanly to push-to-talk dictation, because it gives you four pre-defined places to speak into. Here is the workflow we recommend, with a template you can paste into your EHR or document app and a few practical notes from clinicians using Parakeety in real consultations.

The SOAP structure, briefly

SOAP stands for Subjective, Objective, Assessment, Plan. It originated in problem-oriented medical records and now anchors the encounter note in most primary care, mental health, physiotherapy and other allied health settings.

Subjective. The patient’s own account: presenting complaint, history of presenting complaint, relevant history, what they are worried about.
Objective. What you observed and measured: examination findings, vitals, mental-state findings, test results to hand.
Assessment. Your clinical reasoning: differential, working diagnosis, severity, risk.
Plan. What happens next: investigations, treatment, prescriptions, safety-netting, follow-up.

The template

Set up the headings as a single snippet. macOS built-in Text Replacement (System Settings, Keyboard, Text Replacement) handles this with no extra software: pick a trigger like ;soap and have it expand to:

Subjective:

Objective:

Assessment:

Plan:

Type the trigger at the top of the patient record, hit space to expand, and you have four blank lines to dictate into. Click below each heading, hold the push-to-talk key, speak that section, release.

The same approach works in any text-accepting field: Word, the SOAP template inside SystmOne, EMIS, Epic, Pages, Notes, Bear, a web-based EHR. Parakeety pastes at the cursor wherever you are.

Dictation notes per section

Subjective. This section reads like a paragraph of patient-centred prose. Speak in natural sentences and let the model handle punctuation from your cadence. Cliché openings translate fine: "fifty-two year old male, presenting with chest pain for three days, no radiation, no associated symptoms." Direct quotes from the patient can be dictated with "quote unquote" markers if useful, but most clinicians simply paraphrase.

Objective. Structured findings often work better dictated as short sentences than as a single long string. "Heart rate 78. Blood pressure 132 over 84. Respiratory rate 14. Saturations 98 percent on air. Apyrexial." The transducer model handles the cadence well; expect occasional manual correction for unusual numbers or rare abbreviations.

Assessment. The clinical reasoning section is where dictation pays the most back, because it benefits from being said in the way you would explain the case to a colleague rather than typed in clipped bullet form. Speak the differential, the working diagnosis and the severity in connected sentences.

Plan. Numbered lists do not need to be dictated as numbers. Most clinicians dictate the plan as sentences ("start amoxicillin five hundred milligrams TDS for seven days, safety-net advice given, review in seven days if no improvement, sooner if worsening") and let the prose stand. If the EHR expects a structured list, run a quick pass with the keyboard to format afterwards.

Practical tips

Hold the key for as long as you are talking. Push-to-talk gives you full control of when the model is listening. Pauses inside a held key are fine; the transcript covers them.
Stop, edit, continue. Release the key, scan what landed, correct anything, then click into the next section and hold again. A SOAP note typically takes three or four push-to-talk presses, not one long one.
Set a consistent shortcut. The section key (§) is the Parakeety default and sits next to the keyboard rest position. If your physical keyboard does not have it, remap to a key you reach without looking.
Headphones if the room is loud. A wired or bluetooth headset mic outperforms the built-in MacBook microphone for clinical environments with monitors and HVAC noise.
Read once before you save. No speech model is perfect on numbers, drug doses and unusual names. Reading the note before locking it in is good clinical practice anyway.

Privacy

The privacy-relevant fact for clinical dictation with Parakeety: audio is captured to memory on the Mac, transcribed on the Apple Neural Engine, pasted at the cursor and discarded. It never leaves the machine. Under HIPAA, there is no business associate handling Protected Health Information. Under NHS information governance, the dictation pathway does not introduce a third-party processor.

The full unpacking, including how this differs from cloud dictation under a Business Associate Agreement, is in HIPAA and dictation: architectural vs contractual privacy. The clinician-specific piece is Parakeety for clinicians and GPs.

Variants: DAP, BIRP, others

The same template-and-dictate pattern adapts to other structures. DAP (Data, Assessment, Plan) is common in counselling and psychotherapy. BIRP (Behaviour, Intervention, Response, Plan) shows up in mental-health practice. Some allied health settings use APIE (Assessment, Plan, Implementation, Evaluation). Set up the headings as a Text Replacement snippet, click into each section, hold the key, dictate. The mechanics do not change.

The therapist-specific deeper read is Parakeety for therapists and counselors.

FAQ

How long does dictating a SOAP note take with Parakeety?: Two to three minutes for a typical primary-care consultation note, including the subjective and objective sections, assessment and plan. Faster than typing for most people; the time you save adds up across a clinic. The transcription itself is essentially instant once you release the push-to-talk key.
Does Parakeety understand medical terminology?: Parakeet TDT v3 is a general-purpose speech model and handles common clinical vocabulary, including drug names, anatomical terms and procedure language, well enough that most consultations dictate cleanly. Expect occasional manual correction for very specialised terms or unusual brand-name drugs; the same caveat applies to every general-purpose speech model.
Is dictating PHI with Parakeety safe under HIPAA and NHS information governance?: Audio is captured to memory, transcribed on the Apple Neural Engine and discarded; it never leaves the Mac. There is no Protected Health Information being disclosed to a third party, so the rules HIPAA places on business associates do not engage for the audio path. NHS information governance treats third-party processing similarly; on-device transcription removes the third party. The cornerstone piece on architectural vs contractual privacy unpacks this in full.
Can I use the same workflow for DAP or BIRP notes?: Yes. The structure changes but the dictation pattern does not. Replace the four SOAP headings with the headings your discipline uses (DAP: Data, Assessment, Plan; BIRP: Behaviour, Intervention, Response, Plan), dictate the body of each section, edit briefly. Set up your template as a TextExpander snippet or built-in macOS Text Replacement.

Try it

Parakeety is a Mac menu-bar app. Hold the section key, talk, release; your words paste at the cursor in whichever app you were typing into. Audio never leaves the machine. There is a free 7-day trial with no card required. After that it is $30 once.

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