AI Scribe FAQ: What People Are Really Asking on Reddit, Professional Forums & LLMs  (2025 edition)

Clinicians are looking for a better way to handle notes. Charting spills into evenings, live scribes cost too much, and EHR tools rarely deliver as promised. So they turn to Reddit, professional forums, and AI chats, looking for real answers from those who've been there.

This article is built from those conversations. We’ve gathered the questions clinicians actually ask and answered them with firsthand insights, case studies, and field‑tested takeaways, what works, what doesn’t, and what to watch out for.

Whether you're trying an AI scribe for the first time or rethinking the one you use, this guide stays grounded in reality and updated monthly to keep pace with what matters.

How we curate & update

• Sources: We track +50 healthcare subreddits, SDN threads, WCI & PA forums, plus “People Also Ask” data from leading LLMs.
• Verification: Each answer is cross‑checked against peer‑reviewed studies, vendor case studies or KLAS/CHIME market reports.

Update cadence: New Q&A pairs are added monthly; outdated stats are replaced as fresh benchmarks appear.

1. Is an AI scribe really HIPAA compliant?

“Most of them are self‑described as HIPAA compliant, but from my understanding that requires the hospital to sign a BAA. Does anyone have knowledge or experience with this process?” Reddit

Answer:
Yes—but only if three boxes are checked:

Expert angle: Kaiser Permanente physicians saved 15 000 documentation hours in the first year of their ambient scribe deployment without a single HIPAA violation, highlighting how strong governance and automation can coexist. 

2. Does it work for telehealth or only in‑person visits?

“Any experience using an AI scribe in telehealth (Zoom)?” Reddit

Answer:
Modern ambient scribes capture audio at the device level—typically via a lightweight desktop or mobile app—so video, phone and in‑office encounters all route through the same pipeline. Twofold Health users just click “Start Note” inside the telehealth window; the scribe records locally, streams to a private GPU instance and returns a SOAP or DAP note within ~20 seconds. No PHI ever travels through Zoom’s cloud.

Clinical study tip: a 2025 EPIC Signal analysis at UCI Health showed a 28 % drop in after‑hours charting for virtual visits after ambient listening tools were enabled. 

3. How much does an AI scribe actually cost per note?

“It costs me about 25 cents to do a progress note and 75 cents to do an evaluation when I run my own home‑brewed scribe.” Reddit

Answer:
Self‑hosting transcription models can be cheap on paper, but you still carry liability, maintenance and prompt‑engineering overhead. Commercial SaaS scribes price‑out in two common ways:

• Usage‑based – $0.05–$0.60 per encounter minute, better for low‑volume specialists.
• Seat‑based – $49–$149 / month for unlimited notes, preferred by high‑volume primary‑care and therapy clinics.

Twofold Health uses the second model—$49 / month (annual) for unlimited notes, plus a free 20‑note trial—so an average therapist creating 120 notes / month nets an all‑in cost of $0.41 per note with no surprise overages.

4. What about accuracy—does it still “hallucinate”?

“I tested three AI scribe apps… accuracy is very good. Some even learn new words.” Reddit

Answer:
Accuracy depends on three layers:

1. Speech‑to‑Text (STT) engine—specialty‑tuned models hit 98 % word accuracy in quiet rooms.
2. Clinical Language Model—fine‑tuned on medical corpora to map STT output to SOAP elements.
3. Post‑processing rules—templates, ICD‑10/DSM‑5 look‑ups, allergy cross‑checks.

Peer‑review data: a 2024 comparative study found purpose‑built medical LLMs achieved a 15‑point F1 improvement over general GPT‑4o‑mini, cutting hallucinations by 43 %. 

Twofold Health stacks a board‑certified reviewer on top of this pipeline for continuous model retraining; flagged hallucinations fell below 0.2 % last quarter.

5. Could a free AI scribe jeopardise patient privacy?

“I’d be very careful using a free app to transcribe patient encounters… these companies have a habit of saying one thing and doing something else.” Reddit

Answer:
When no one pays, data is the product. Free tools often reserve the right to use de‑identified transcripts for model training, which still carries breach risk. Always confirm:

• A signed BAA (see §1).
• Explicit opt‑out from model‑training with PHI.
• SOC 2 Type II or ISO 27001 certification.

Twofold Health’s paid‑only model means revenue comes from subscriptions—not reselling data—and its BAA forbids secondary data use.

6. Is an AI scribe worthwhile for mental‑health providers?

“Most platforms are around $100/month… the reason I like Twofold’s $49/month is you get unlimited notes and templates built for therapy.” Reddit

Answer:
Yes, especially because psychotherapy sessions are narrative‑heavy. Twofold Health’s mental‑health pack adds:

• DAP & BIRP templates out‑of‑the‑box.
• Progress‑insights assistant that can query all past notes, not just one session.
• Insurance‑friendly summaries (CPT, DSM‑5) generated automatically.

Result: clinicians in our beta cut note‑writing from 9 minutes to under 2 minutes per 50‑minute session while improving completion rates on treatment‑plan updates.

7. Will AI scribes replace human scribes - or clinicians?

Short answer: no. Ambient scribes free clinicians from clerical work but still require them to:

1. Verify medical decision‑making.
2. Sign notes in the EHR.
3. Maintain patient rapport.

AMA’s 2025 physician survey shows 68 % of doctors see AI as an “adjunct,” not a replacement, and administrative relief is their top use‑case. 

Next steps for readers

• Compare vendors side‑by‑side with our free resources and guides.
• Try a live demo: record a de‑identified five‑minute encounter and watch three different AI scribes draft the same note.