Emilia, our patient AI scribe, blows out her first candle

Emilia

Francis Robichaud

Lime Health Founder and CEO

One year ago, on September 22, 2025, we placed Emilia in the hands of patients. To our knowledge, it was the first patient AI scribe in Canada: an application that records a medical consultation and provides the user with a clear, popularized summary, which they can then have translated into over fifteen languages.

Twelve months later, Emilia has made a name for herself. La Presse dedicated an article to her explaining how the application helps patients remember what is said during consultations, and the tool was also featured on the show Première Heure on ICI Première, Radio-Canada. The specialized magazine Canadian Healthcare Technology also covered the launch, emphasizing its contribution to health equity.

The application then connected to Patients Know Best (PKB), a personal health record platform that brings together over 7 million patients and is integrated with the NHS App in the United Kingdom. Thanks to this partnership, a summary generated by Emilia can now land directly in a British patient's PKB record. This was Emilia's first integration outside Canada, ahead of expansion into Switzerland and 28 European countries.

In terms of recognition, Emilia is a finalist for the Health Innovation Award at the 36th ADRIQ Innovation Awards Gala, which highlights innovations with a significant impact on the health and well-being of patients in Quebec, and is among the ten companies selected for the Innovation Showcase 2026 at the MIT Sloan CIO Symposium, an annual gathering of chief information officers (CIOs) and digital leaders from several countries.

The starting premise, however, has not changed from one country to another: no matter how a health system is funded, the same scene is repeated. The patient leaves their appointment unable to recall everything they were just told, even though they will need to follow the recommendations received. Here is what this first year, across three continents, has taught us about this problem and how to address it.

The patient enters the consultation empty-handed, and they are the one who must remember everything

A medical consultation lasts an average of fifteen to twenty minutes. In this short span of time, a healthcare professional transmits a considerable volume of information: a diagnosis, a treatment plan, dosage instructions, warning signs, follow-up. The patient, stressed and sometimes in pain, remembers only a fraction of it.

They are then expected to carry this information, explain it to their spouse, their children, relay it faithfully to their family doctor who was not in the room, to their pharmacist, and to the specialist seen six weeks later. The most anxious and least equipped person in the chain becomes the messenger. The professional has an electronic record, a dictation system, sometimes a scribe. The patient has their memory, and with any luck, a note scribbled on a scrap of paper.

A patient is never just one person

This has been the most consistent theme of the year, and the same problem extends far beyond the patient themselves. A diagnosis mobilizes an entire community: a spouse, children, parents, close friends, sometimes an employer. All of these people need to understand what is happening to be able to help, and they usually receive information second-hand, filtered through the memory of the person least able to reconstruct it.

Nearly a third of the summaries generated by Emilia come precisely from a joint consultation: a caregiver accompanying an aging parent, an adult child remotely following a parent's record, a spouse present at the appointment. When this person can share a faithful summary with the rest of the family, thanks to Emilia's sharing feature, the care circle understands the situation better and can provide better support.

Emilia in the care ecosystem, a scribe that complements rather than competes

There are already AI scribes designed for clinicians to support them in their practice. Emilia is a different kind of scribe; she completes the ecosystem by putting the patient and caregivers at the center. These are not two tools competing for the same spot, but two scribes designed for two different realities, complementing rather than competing with each other.

For the clinician, an AI scribe in the office means more efficient consultations, an end to taking notes during the conversation, automatically generated documentation for the medical record, and restored eye contact with the patient.

For the patient, Emilia means increased understanding and retention, a plain-language summary of medical terms, resources to navigate the next steps in their care journey, the care circle included in a single tap, and continuity of information between the various professionals consulted.

Emilia does not diagnose, does not replicate clinical reasoning, and does not access the professional's medical record. She relies solely on the facts and what was said during the consultation, and her role is to ensure that this information and reasoning remain accessible to the patient long after the appointment is over.

What do patients and caregivers say after a year of using Emilia?

What stands out in the many feedbacks received this year is the consistency of the message: patients and caregivers almost all describe the same thing—the feeling of better understanding what was said in the consultation and being able to share it with their loved ones. Here are three examples shared publicly:

Myriam Brel, a digital health advisor, commented on the enthusiasm surrounding this type of tool. “What a pleasure to see patient partners mobilizing around AI,” she wrote, before adding that a scribe designed for patients and caregivers puts an end to forgetting by keeping structured information in the patient's hands.

Amélie Tremblay, who introduced her parents to Emilia, says: “In just a few minutes, the tool simplified their healthcare follow-up and made conversations much smoother.” They even created a shared folder to gather all their reports, a simple way to have clear follow-up for the whole family.

On the clinical side, Dr. Keith Thompson, Chief Medical Officer at Nuralogix, tested Emilia alongside his own office note scribe. His conclusion: “This tool is exceptional for the summaries it creates for patients.” The summary intended for his patient even captured a specific recommendation prior to a test that his usual scribe had missed.

Quality, transparency, and privacy

The quality of the summaries is never taken for granted. Rather than claiming a fixed percentage, the team regularly tests a sample of summaries using a second, distinct AI, tasked with evaluating reliability using an approach known as LLM as a judge.

Respect for privacy follows the same logic. The audio recording of a consultation is automatically deleted as soon as the summary is generated, and the full transcript of the conversation is never shown to the patient—a deliberate choice to retain only what is necessary. Furthermore, Emilia is not designed as a recording tool in the strict sense that would produce a word-for-word transcript of the consultation. Instead, its strength lies in contextualizing the discussion. It presents key information in the form of popularized excerpts, explains complex medical terms, and extracts action items to guide the patient in the next steps of their care journey.

Moreover, health data is encrypted and hosted in the patient's region, in Canada or Belgium, and is never sold to third parties or used to train artificial intelligence.

Transparency also extends to the relationship with the professional. Although a patient has the right in Canada to record their own consultation without the professional's explicit consent, Emilia encourages patients to speak openly with their clinician about it, not because the law requires it, but because the therapeutic relationship is built on trust. The rules are not the same everywhere, and the Emilia experience adapts to each region where the application is offered, whether in the United States or Europe.

Toward broader collaboration with the healthcare network

Over the past year, the team spent time in the field, at various industry events, but also directly with patients and healthcare professionals. We also engaged with patient partner associations and community health organizations. One thing is certain: patients will increasingly use AI as a self-care tool. Major players in the healthcare network have themselves set patient empowerment as a goal, and the use of AI will inevitably be part of the solution to achieve this. These tools must therefore be built transparently and in collaboration with the network, just as we are doing with Emilia. The impact will not be limited to the patient and their care circle but will extend to the healthcare network and the population. A patient who remembers and retains the information shared by their professional is an engaged patient. They adhere better to the treatment plan, identify warning signs earlier, and arrive at the next appointment prepared rather than lost.

In less than a year, Emilia has quickly become an essential tool in the health ecosystem. We are proud of the impact on all the patients and users who have trusted us. The concept of a patient scribe was more than necessary, and Emilia has a real impact on improving the patient experience.

This patient scribe remains free for patients and their caregivers, and that will not change.

Thank you to the patients, caregivers, and professionals who agreed to share their experience with Emilia this year.