The situation in private healthcare in Catalonia
Dental clinics, physiotherapy centres, psychology practices, polyclinics: in Barcelona and its metropolitan area there are hundreds of private centres where professionals end the day typing. AI transcription is already reaching consulting rooms, and Catalonia’s public health system has put it out to tender: CatSalut and the ICS are looking for voice transcription with structured reports in primary care, and they give weight to the open models from the AINA project. The message is clear: local and in Catalan.
The problem for a private clinic is that many solutions on the market send consultation audio to external servers. With health data, which the GDPR treats as a special category, that means trusting a third party with the most sensitive information you hold.
What it looks like day to day
The physiotherapist starts the recording with the patient’s consent. When the session ends, she has an organised draft on screen, which she corrects in a minute before saving it to the record. Before the next visit, the assistant summarises the three previous reports, with a link to each one. At reception, someone asks which version of the consent form for a treatment is current, and the assistant cites it.
Everything runs on a machine inside the clinic: no audio leaves the premises and there is no per-professional fee. We use transcription with speaker identification every day in our Barcelona lab, locally.
What it does not do
It does not diagnose, prescribe or decide. It is a documentation and search tool; clinical responsibility lies with the professional, who reviews every text before it goes into the record. If a tool claims to diagnose, it stops being an assistant and becomes a medical device with its own CE marking. That is not our field, and we say so from the start.
How we deploy it
- Assessment. We review the consultation workflow, your medical records software and how you inform patients today. We involve your data protection officer from the outset.
- Pilot of 2 to 4 weeks. One or two professionals, one type of visit, real recordings. We measure documentation time before and after, and the quality of the drafts.
- Production. More professionals, protocol search, a usage policy, team training and maintenance.
In Catalan, too
Many consultations in Barcelona are held in Catalan, or switch between Catalan and Spanish in the same sentence. We work with transcription and language models that handle both languages, we follow resources from the AINA project and Softcatalà, and we have expanded our models’ Catalan vocabulary: the coverage of the ‘draft’ model that speeds up responses rose from 75.2% to 99.6%. Even so, we test it with your recordings during the pilot.
When you don’t need it
If you only need text templates or appointment reminders with no clinical data, you don’t need an AI server: the software you already use will do it for less.