Estonian hospitals now let AI write up the patient conversation. A doctor still signs every line.

ERR reported on 19 October that AI which records the conversation between doctor and patient, turns it into a written summary and helps with diagnosis is becoming routine in Estonian hospitals. The Ministry of Social Affairs told ERR that private hospitals have moved fastest. There is no single national system. Each hospital mostly finds its own tool.

Confido started testing last year, uses the tool in several departments and plans to roll it out across the whole organisation. At Medicum, family doctors, specialists and midwives use AI transcription, and support staff use it to cut paperwork. Heba clinic uses AI to pull a patient’s history together before the visit, document the conversation and write the summary and explanations afterwards. Narva Hospital is running a tender for Estonian-language speech recognition, plus an assistant that suggests medical codes.

Tartu University Hospital began a pilot in its emergency department in mid-October with an app called EMO24, which gathers information from patients about their condition and drafts summaries. The trial runs for three months. If it proves useful, a six-month project follows. Aime Keis, head of the department, said the goal is to save the time doctors and nurses spend on documentation and to spare patients from repeating their story to several people. Tartu Postimees added that the app works only for patients already in the department and may help most when staff and patient do not share a language.

The rules are the useful part

Health data is about as sensitive as data gets, so the safeguards these hospitals chose are worth reading closely. Patients must be told that the conversation is recorded and why. At Confido a patient can refuse AI at the front desk. In Tartu taking part is voluntary, and a patient who says no gets the same care as before. Narva Hospital wrote the strictest line into its tender: the doctor stays the decision maker, and AI-generated content that a health worker has not reviewed and confirmed must not enter the patient’s health record.

The ministry says two national tools are in development, a transcriber for primary care and one for the e-ambulance service, and that working groups are preparing clearer legal rules and more transparency for patients. Confido’s chief executive told ERR the state is moving clearly too slowly, and that the state should set a security standard rather than impose one system on everyone.

None of this pays back at once. Confido said implementation needs money up front and quick savings should not be expected. The gain it describes is time: the doctor has more of it for the patient, and patients have welcomed that.

What an Estonian company should do on Monday

You do not need to run a clinic for this to apply. Sales calls, client meetings, job interviews and service visits all end with someone typing up what was said. If hospitals can record and summarise conversations about people’s health, most companies can do it for a meeting about a supply contract, as long as they copy the safeguards along with the tool.

• ✳Pick one conversation type your staff write up by hand every day and time how long the write-up takes. That number is your business case
• ✳Test transcription in Estonian on your own recordings, with your own accents and jargon, before you trust any vendor demo. Narva Hospital is buying Estonian-language speech recognition for a reason
• ✳Copy Narva’s rule word for word into your own policy: nothing an AI wrote goes into the CRM, the contract file or the HR record until a named person has checked and approved it
• ✳Tell people when you record them and why, and give them an easy way to say no that costs them nothing, as Confido and Tartu do
• ✳Budget for the setup and the training, and measure the result in hours returned to the team rather than in instant savings