Dictate clinical notes, SOAP entries, and referral letters in seconds. Steno turns your voice into text inside any app on your Mac, so you can spend less time documenting and more time with patients.
Physicians spend an average of two hours on clinical documentation for every hour of direct patient care. That ratio has only grown worse as EHR requirements have expanded and compliance demands have increased. The result is a profession where the most highly trained people in the building spend the majority of their day typing rather than practicing medicine.
Burnout from documentation is now a leading cause of physician dissatisfaction. It is not the complexity of cases or the emotional weight of patient care that drives doctors out of the profession. It is the keyboard. The endless cycle of clicking through EHR screens, typing notes, and reformatting templates steals time from the work that drew most physicians to medicine in the first place.
Hold the hotkey, speak your subjective findings, objective data, assessment, and plan. Release and the complete note appears in your EHR text field. A note that takes five minutes to type takes 45 seconds to dictate. Steno handles the medical terminology, punctuation, and formatting automatically.
When you need to send a referral, open your email or letter template, hold the hotkey, and dictate the letter as you would speak it to a colleague. The conversational tone of dictation often produces clearer, more effective referral letters than labored typed prose.
After a procedure, dictate your operative note while the details are fresh. Steno works in any text field on your Mac, whether that is your EHR, a Word document, or a plain text editor. No need to switch to a separate dictation application or recording device.
For brief entries like prescription notes, lab orders, or follow-up instructions, the speed advantage of voice is even more pronounced. A ten-word instruction that takes eight seconds to type takes two seconds to speak. Over dozens of orders per day, those seconds compound into meaningful time savings.
Consider a standard progress note for a follow-up visit. Here is what the documentation process looks like with typing versus voice.
| Task | Typing | Voice with Steno |
|---|---|---|
| Chief complaint | 30 seconds | 5 seconds |
| History of present illness | 3 minutes | 45 seconds |
| Physical exam findings | 2 minutes | 30 seconds |
| Assessment and plan | 4 minutes | 1 minute |
| Total per patient | ~10 minutes | ~2.5 minutes |
| Total for 20 patients | 3+ hours | 50 minutes |
That difference of over two hours per day translates to ten hours per week returned to patient care, family time, or professional development. Over a year, that is more than 500 hours. The time savings calculator can help you estimate the exact numbers for your practice.
Traditional medical dictation software is expensive, often costing hundreds of dollars per month per provider. It typically requires installation of complex integrations, training on custom voice profiles, and ongoing IT support. Steno takes a different approach.
Steno is a lightweight Mac app that sits in your menu bar. There is no complex setup, no IT department involvement, and no per-provider licensing fees. It works the moment you install it. Hold a key, speak, release, and text appears wherever your cursor is. The technical architecture is designed for instant response and accurate transcription of professional vocabulary.
Because Steno inserts text using the macOS Accessibility API rather than the clipboard, it does not interfere with your copy-paste workflow. You can dictate a note, then immediately paste a lab result you copied earlier. Nothing is overwritten or lost.
Setting up Steno takes less than 30 seconds. Download the app, grant microphone and accessibility permissions, and you are ready to dictate. The setup guide walks through each step. There is no account creation, no cloud dashboard, and no training period. Speak naturally and Steno transcribes accurately from the first use.
Many physicians start by using Steno for a single workflow, such as after-visit summaries or referral letters, and then expand to full clinical documentation as they become comfortable with the speed. The learning curve is essentially zero because the input method is speaking, which every physician already does all day.
Yes. Steno uses advanced AI transcription powered by large language models that have been trained on medical literature. It accurately recognizes drug names, anatomical terms, diagnostic codes, and clinical abbreviations without requiring a custom medical dictionary.
Steno works in any application where you can type text on your Mac. It inserts text directly into the focused text field using the macOS Accessibility API, so it is compatible with Epic, Cerner, Athenahealth, web-based EHRs, and any other system you access from your Mac.
Steno sends audio to a transcription API for processing and does not store recordings or transcripts on any server after processing is complete. Audio is transmitted over encrypted connections and discarded immediately after transcription. No patient data is retained.
Most physicians type between 30 and 50 words per minute. Speaking naturally produces 130 to 160 words per minute. Steno transcribes in under a second after you stop speaking, so you can complete a full SOAP note in the time it would take to type the chief complaint alone.
Join thousands of professionals who have reclaimed hours from documentation. Steno is free to download for Mac.
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