The chair has a soundscape
A GP consulting room is usually quiet. Two people, one desk, one microphone. A dental surgery is not that. The high-speed handpiece runs at frequencies that swamp a voice microphone; the suction tube gargles; the assistant is on the far side of the chair; the patient answers through cotton rolls. An ambient transcription system built for a consulting room degrades sharply in this environment.
ProClinic's capture layer is built for the chair. Multiple audio channels — clinician, assistant, patient — are separated where possible. Non-speech noise is filtered actively. When a clinician steps away to talk through the plan, the model treats that as a distinct rhetorical mode and structures it accordingly.
Dental vocabulary is unforgiving
A generic scribe will hear “mesial”, “buccal”, “periapical” and “interproximal” and shrug. It will also fail on tooth numbers: is that “forty-six” or “four-six”? Is the class V lesion on 24 or 34?
ProClinic's language layer is dental-first. Anatomic terminology, tooth-number conventions (FDI and Universal), procedure vocabulary, and SA-specific formulary references are all present in the retrieval corpus. The system does not just transcribe — it structures what the clinician says into the correct visit-type template as structured clinical documentation.
The two-handed constraint
A GP can type. A dentist cannot. Every ambient documentation product that expects the clinician to check in with the screen mid-procedure is designed for the wrong workflow. The dentist's hands are in the patient's mouth. The chair-side computer, if it exists, is at arm's length and behind a barrier.
ProClinic's chair-side UI is designed for glance-and-confirm, not read-and-edit. One tap starts capture. The screen shows the transcription status. The full note is reviewed and signed after the patient leaves the chair — not during the procedure. The system fits the workflow, not the other way round.
A generic scribe is not enough
Dental notes are a hybrid of clinical narrative, restorative charting, periodontal findings, and treatment planning that maps directly onto SADA procedure codes and ICD-10 diagnoses. A generic scribe leaves the coding work to the clinician afterwards — which defeats the point.
ProClinic structures the ambient capture into visit-type templates grounded in a verified clinical knowledge base. Each template knows what the clinician typically says, what the coding agent needs to see, and what the medical aid will require in the claim. The system drafts structured clinical documentation and the code in the same pass — one output, one review.
Human at the chair, model in the room
The most important design constraint is not a technical one. It is a governance one. The clinician approves every note, every treatment plan, every prescription, every claim. Ambient capture does not change that. It changes the raw material the clinician approves — from a blank page at ten in the evening to a structured draft ready to review at the chair.
ProClinic AI · Field notes from the operating room of dental practice.