Capturing cases

The fastest way to log a case is: type the name and MRN, dictate the notes, tap Capture. The app sorts out the structure (procedure, side, role) on its own.

This page covers capturing a case yourself. To bring in past cases from a spreadsheet or eLogbook export, see Importing & reconciling cases.

The capture form

Patient name and MRN — at the top. Required, typed manually.
Notes — the main field. Type or dictate. The app reads your notes to fill in everything else.
Microphone — next to the Notes label. Tap to record; the words appear as you speak; tap again to stop. By default the recording is transcribed on your phone — no audio is sent anywhere. There’s an optional higher-accuracy mode that changes this for a recording; it’s off unless you turn it on, and it’s covered below.
- Instant on the first tap, if you set it up. If you tapped Enable at the Set up voice dictation step during onboarding, voice is ready and your first dictation starts straight away. If you skipped it — or you’re an existing user — the very first tap sets things up on the spot (the microphone permission, and on an on-device-only phone a one-time voice-pack download), so that one recording starts a little slower; every dictation after is instant. Already using the app and want to skip that first-tap wait? A one-time “Make dictation instant” prompt in Settings sets it up ahead of time.
Add details — an expander for procedure, side, anatomical site, role. The app fills these from your notes if you don’t.

The MRN, and why it’s locked

Every case carries an MRN — the hospital number that links the case back to your hospital’s own records, the same number in its EMR. That number is the thread that ties the case to everything else: an eLogbook export, a settlement sheet, your credentialing report. The app leans on it to match the same patient across sources, so it keeps the MRN steady.

Because of that, once a case has an MRN, the MRN is locked. You’ll see it on the case, but you can’t edit it. The clearest place this shows up is when you add a patient name to a case that came in without one — through Reconcile, or the + Add name action. There you fill in the name only; the MRN is shown beside it but stays fixed, because changing it would cut the case loose from the records it’s meant to match.

If an MRN is genuinely wrong — a real typo from the source, not just a number you’d rather format differently — there’s a guided way to correct it, covered next.

Fixing a wrong MRN

Sometimes the MRN on a case is simply wrong — a digit slipped, or it was typed from the wrong record. You can’t edit it in place, because the MRN is the patient’s identity and changing it quietly would break every link the case depends on. Instead the app corrects it the safe way: it makes a fresh copy of the case with the right MRN and hides the old one. Your records stay clean, and nothing is ever lost.

To start, open the case, tap the … menu, and choose Correct the MRN. A short, four-step guide walks you through it:

Review. You see the case as it stands — procedure, date, hospital, and the MRN that’s currently on it.
Enter the corrected MRN. Type the right number. The other details are pre-filled from the case; edit any that also need fixing. The hospital can’t change here — the corrected case stays at the same hospital. The corrected MRN is encrypted on your device before it leaves your phone; the servers only ever store scrambled bytes and never see the number itself.
Choose what carries over. Most of a case belongs to the operation, not the MRN — the operation still happened; only the number was wrong. So the procedures, your surgical team, any teaching tags, and any photos move to the corrected case by default. A few things are left behind by default — authority sign-offs and import provenance — because they may have been tied to the wrong record. Each one is a simple on/off switch, so you decide. Anything you leave off stays with the old case, which is hidden but kept. If the case has earnings on it, this step also asks one plain question: move those earnings to the corrected case, or leave them on the old one? Leaving them behind is the safe default, because a wrong MRN can mean the figures were never this case’s.
Confirm. To be sure, you type the corrected MRN once more, then tap Correct the MRN. The app lands you on the new, corrected case.

A few things worth knowing:

The old case isn’t deleted — it’s hidden. It drops off your case list, but it’s kept behind the scenes as a record of the correction. Nothing is erased.
You’re in control of what moves. Carrying things over is your choice, switch by switch. The sensible defaults are there to save you taps, not to decide for you.
If the corrected MRN is on a settlement sheet, the case will verify on the next reconcile. You don’t have to do anything extra — the corrected number simply matches up the next time figures come in.
You can now move earnings to the corrected case. If the case has financial figures on it, the guide asks whether to re-link them to the corrected record or leave them on the old one. If you move them, the corrected case lines up with your settlement sheet again and is marked verified once more. Your actual earning amounts never change — only which case they belong to.
Bilateral cases aren’t supported yet. If the case is part of a bilateral pair, correcting its MRN this way is coming soon — the app will tell you rather than start the guide.

Dictating well

A workable dictation:

“TKR right knee for severe OA in a 65-year-old man. Tourniquet 90 minutes. Cemented Stryker Triathlon. Primary surgeon. Slightly difficult exposure due to obesity. Independent.”

Tips:

Say the structure first — “right knee TKR” before the long description. If transcription loses the tail, the important fields still land.
Read the transcript before you tap Capture. The words appear live as you speak, so you can see straight away if a term comes out wrong and stop to fix it. The app already cleans up common medical terms for you, and it learns from your edits — a term you correct once is more likely to come out right next time. Edit anything wrong before submitting.
You don’t have to speak up. The app evens out the loudness of your recording on the phone before reading it, so a quiet, arm’s-length, or soft-spoken dictation is lifted to a comfortable level — you don’t need to hold the phone close or raise your voice. An already-loud recording is left alone.
Say numbers as words — “ninety minutes” works better than “9-0 minutes”.
Operative times are picked up too. If you say start and finish times (“started 9:15, finished 10:45”) or a duration (“took about ninety minutes”), the app fills the case’s operative time for you. These are clinical times only — your earnings are never dictated.
Three seconds of silence stops the recording. If you pause to think, the recording ends — tap the microphone again to continue. The transcript appends where your cursor is.
Three-minute cap per recording. Long enough for a full dictation — and because the words appear as you speak, you can watch the transcript land and stop when you’re done.
Dictation is the same full-screen view everywhere. Every microphone in the app — the notes on an existing case, the feedback form, the manual-capture notes — opens the same clean recording view as this one, and drops your words in where your cursor was when you stop.

Higher-accuracy cloud transcription (off by default)

On-device transcription is free, works offline, and your audio never leaves the phone — that’s the default, and for most surgeons it’s all you need. But the on-device model can’t be told your accent or your sub-specialty vocabulary in advance, so if it keeps mis-hearing the same terms, there’s one opt-in escape hatch.

You can turn it on in two places — both flip the same switch. Settings → High-accuracy cloud dictation turns it on for every microphone in the app at once (the notes on an existing case, the feedback form, manual-capture notes, and the voice screen), and the voice pre-record screen has the same toggle for the moment you need it. The choice applies to this device — turn it on again on another phone or browser. On either surface the toggle appears only when the higher-accuracy option is actually available to you. When it’s on, your words appear on screen live as you speak, just like on-device — but transcribed by a secure, healthcare-grade service, so heavily accented or dense sub-specialty dictation comes out right as you watch. The first time you turn it on — from either place — the app shows the same short, plain-spoken consent once, because this changes what leaves your phone:

It’s off unless you turn it on. When it’s off — the default — nothing changes: everything stays on your device.
A cloud recording leaves your phone. For a cloud capture, the audio — including any patient name you speak aloud — is sent to the transcription service for that one recording. This is the one exception to “your audio never leaves the phone”, and the consent says so plainly. If that matters for a given case, leave cloud mode off and dictate without the patient’s name, or type the notes.
Nothing is kept. The service works under a signed healthcare data agreement with no retention — the audio and transcript are deleted right after, and nothing is stored on our servers.
You’ll always know which mode you’re in. While recording in cloud mode, a small “High-accuracy cloud” badge sits next to the live words. On-device recordings show no badge — no badge means nothing left your phone.
The rest is unchanged. The words that come back still run the same on-device patient-name and MRN redaction, and the same review-before-Capture, as an on-device transcript.
Your recording is never lost. If the live cloud connection can’t be made, or drops mid-dictation, the app keeps recording anyway — the badge adds a calm “words appear when you finish”, and the whole recording is transcribed when you stop. If the cloud is unreachable entirely, it falls straight back to on-device. Whatever happens to the connection, you never lose a dictation.
A toggle turns it back off any time.

What happens after you tap Capture

The case appears on your case list straight away.
In the background, the app reads your notes and fills in the procedure, side, role, and any clinical findings you mentioned. If you said the patient’s age or sex (“a 65-year-old man”), those are picked up too and shown quietly on the case — like everything else about a patient, they’re encrypted on your device before they leave.
If the app is unsure about anything important, it asks you on the case page. Answer there — no separate review queue.

Procedure matching

Whatever you say or type for the procedure is matched to the standard list automatically, in the background, the moment you capture. You don’t pick from a list or wait — the case appears straight away with your own words, and a beat later the match settles in quietly. The same matching the app runs on a hospital’s billing names when you import runs here on what you dictated.

Your case list reads the way you speak. The first time the app matches a procedure you’ve dictated, it remembers how you said it — “ORIF plating shaft of humerus”, say — and from then on that’s how the procedure reads on your case list, every time. Until it has learned your wording for a procedure, it starts with a sensible default for where you practise. Surgeons in different places call the same operation by different names, and the list should show yours.

Why a standardised name exists underneath. Counting has to be exact: your case mix, your insights, and your comparisons over time only work if the same operation always counts as one procedure, however it’s worded. So behind your wording, every matched case carries the name from the standard procedure list — open a case and you’ll see it quietly beneath, as “standardised as: Fracture diaphysis humerus - ORIF”. Your words are what you see; the standardised name is what your numbers run on. Two surgeons dictating “ORIF distal radius” in their own words still end up counted as the same procedure, so your numbers line up across sources and over time.

You can change your wording any time under Settings → Procedures → Your terminology — one line per procedure you’ve actually done, your wording on top and the standardised name beneath. Edit a line and your whole case list follows. Changing the wording never changes which procedure a case counts as — only how it reads.

Nothing is ever silently swapped: your exact dictation is also kept on each case as “from your dictation: …”, so you can always see what you actually said on the day. If the app isn’t confident of the match, it leaves your words as they are rather than guess, and you can match it yourself. And if an entry could genuinely be more than one distinct procedure — “fracture humerus, plate” could be the proximal, shaft, or distal operation, and those are different procedures — the app still asks you rather than pick one.

You can correct the match on any case with one tap: open the case, tap the procedure, and pick the right one. A correction here changes that case only — your dictation stays your own and never becomes part of the hospital’s shared billing vocabulary.

The matching itself runs on the app’s servers, on the procedure wording alone — never on the patient’s name or number, which stay encrypted on your phone.

The same matching, and how to review and correct it in bulk for an import, is covered in Importing & reconciling cases.

Editing a case

Open a case → tap Edit in the top right. Change anything; tap Save. The original values are kept in history (open the … menu).

Two things to know in edit mode:

The microphone next to Notes works the same as on capture. Transcripts append at your cursor, not at the end.
The Extract fields from notes button re-runs the auto-fill over your latest text. If you edited the notes, the app saves them first so the fresh text gets read.

Combined operations — more than one procedure in a sitting

Some cases are more than one operation under the same anaesthetic — an ORIF distal radius with a carpal tunnel release, say. A case can record all of them.

The first procedure is the main one. It’s the name your case list shows and the one your numbers count. The others are listed beneath it on the case page.
Add or remove procedures from the case page. Open the case and use Add procedure in the procedures section — you pick from the same procedure list as always. Each procedure has its own remove control.
Removing the main procedure promotes the next one. Delete the first and the procedure below it becomes the main one. A case always keeps at least one procedure this way.
Side is asked per procedure, when it matters. If a procedure needs a side (left, right, bilateral), the case page asks for it on that procedure — so a right wrist and a left knee in the same sitting each carry their own side.
On the case list, extra procedures show as “+N more” next to the main procedure’s name. The full list is on the case page, one tap away.

A note on bilateral operations, since they come up: if the procedure list has a combined bilateral entry (bilateral TKR, for instance), record it as one procedure marked bilateral. If it doesn’t — two trigger finger releases on different hands, say — record two procedures, each with its own side. And an operation staged over two sittings on different days is two cases, not one: a case is one patient, one sitting, one date.

Procedures you add or rearrange yourself are yours — the automatic matching never changes them.

Adding your surgical team — co-surgeons

A case is often more than one surgeon. You might be the primary on a pelvic-trauma case and call in a urologist to expose a delicate region — the urologist is your secondary surgeon. Or a colleague calls you in to assist his osteotomy — then he is primary on his case and you are secondary on yours. You can record the other surgeons on a case alongside your own role.

Open the case and find the surgical team. Your own role is shown first; the other surgeons are listed beneath it.
Add a surgeon by name and role. Type the colleague’s name and pick a role — secondary surgeon or tertiary surgeon. The order is the ranking: secondary first, tertiary next.
The language is primary / secondary / tertiary — never “assistant”. These are peers on the same operation.
Names here are just colleagues’ names — professional credit, not patient information. They’re stored as plain text and aren’t part of the encrypted patient record.

Your own role stays exactly as you set it, and it’s the role that appears on your case list, in your statistics, and on a credentialing export. Recording a co-surgeon never changes any of that — it simply adds who else was there.

If you’re a trainee

On a posting you’ve marked as a training post, the case page also asks for your supervision — whether you performed the case independently, were supervised, assisted, or observed — and lets you record the supervising consultant under whom the case sat, as one more member of the team. On a consultant posting these don’t appear (you operate independently by default), and the earnings section is shown instead. Set your role per hospital under Settings → Hospitals.

Recording earnings per case

If you don’t have a hospital settlement spreadsheet — cash work, private practice, or a posting where you only keep a case list — you can record earnings on the case itself. Open a case and use the Financials section to enter:

Generated — the total bill for the case.
Surgeon fee — your take-home. You can type the amount directly, or enter a percentage and let the app work it out.

The app remembers your usual ratio per hospital and pre-fills the fee when you type Generated; change it any time. Both numbers are typed, not dictated — money never goes through voice — and, like patient names, they are scrambled on your phone with your backup password before they ever leave it. The servers store only unreadable bytes, so the team behind the app never sees a readable earnings figure of yours, on this case or any other. The currency follows the hospital, so you never pick it.

These figures power a Light Fair Return view under Insights → Fair return: your earnings, earnings per hour (when you’ve also recorded operative time), and the effective percentage you keep — each shown with how many of your cases it was computed from. If a hospital later sends an authoritative settlement sheet, that sheet’s figures take over for that period.

The Financials section appears for consultant postings. If you’ve marked a hospital as a training post, it stays hidden there. Set your role per hospital under Settings → Hospitals.

Adding a hospital — how the list is scoped

When you add a hospital under Settings → Hospitals, the search list shows hospitals where you are. The app works out your country automatically — from your phone’s timezone, and from your connection when you’re on the live app — so you don’t have to pick one. The country is shown above the search box: “Hospitals in Oman”.

If you’re adding a hospital somewhere else — a visiting post, a locum abroad, a new posting in another country — tap change next to that line and choose the right country. The list, and the hospital you add, then belong to that country. This keeps the currency and the matching correct, so a hospital you add while travelling isn’t filed under your home country by mistake.

You only need to tap change when the hospital is somewhere other than where you are right now. The rest of the time the right country is already chosen.

What doesn’t work yet

If you start a capture and navigate away before tapping Capture, the form is cleared. Capture in one go.

To bring in a backlog of past cases instead of capturing them one by one, see Importing & reconciling cases.