Geriatrics dictation software for geriatric assessments and care planning

A geriatric visit is long because it covers everything at once. A comprehensive geriatric assessment moves through cognition, mood, function, falls, continence, nutrition and the medication list. A follow up for mild cognitive impairment or dementia records a Montreal Cognitive Assessment score and what the family is noticing at home. A medication review weighs each drug against the Beers Criteria. Advance care planning visits document who the health care proxy is and what the patient wants. Nursing home and home visits add their own forms. Dictating saves the most typing in exactly these narrative notes.

Geriatrics words general dictation gets wrong

General dictation software is trained on everyday speech, so geriatrics terms come out as near misses. Each row below is a misheard form listed in the VoicePrivate Healthcare dictionary and the term it is corrected to:

Some of these are ordinary English words, such as "living wool" and "gate training", which is why a general spell checker lets them through. The Healthcare dictionary carries the phrase, so the clinical term is written instead.

What choosing Geriatrics changes

In the Mac app, Settings has a Medical specialty picker with 32 specialties plus General. Choosing Geriatrics does two things on your computer:

• It gives recognition the 24 Geriatrics core terms to expect: mild cognitive impairment, dementia, delirium, Montreal Cognitive Assessment, activities of daily living, polypharmacy, Beers Criteria, deprescribing, orthostatic, sarcopenia, frailty, incontinence, oxybutynin, diphenhydramine, donepezil, memantine, zolpidem, Timed Up and Go, advance directive, health care proxy, goals of care, palliative care, pressure injury, osteoporosis.
• A long misheard word that is a near miss of one of those core terms is matched to it instead of a general word.

The Healthcare dictionary tags 915 terms to Geriatrics, counted October 2026, and all 74,000+ medical terms stay available whichever specialty you choose. On Windows there is no specialty picker: the full medical dictionary and its corrections apply to every note.

Geriatrics notes by type

Example: dictating a cognition and falls follow up

Here is the visit dictated one section at a time. Every bold term is in the VoicePrivate medical dictionary.

1. In the HPI box, press Command+Shift+Space and say: "Eighty three year old with mild cognitive impairment and two falls since the last visit, no injury. Daughter reports more trouble with bills." Press the hotkey again.
2. In the exam section, press Command+Shift+Space and say: "Montreal Cognitive Assessment 21 of 30, down from 24. Timed Up and Go 16 seconds. Orthostatic drop of 22 points systolic." Press the hotkey again.
3. In the medication section, press Command+Shift+Space and say: "Polypharmacy review against the Beers Criteria. Deprescribing diphenhydramine and oxybutynin. Taper zolpidem over 4 weeks." Press the hotkey again.
4. In the plan, press Command+Shift+Space and say: "Discussed goals of care. Daughter is health care proxy. Advance directive on file. Physical therapy for gait and balance. Return in 6 weeks." Press the hotkey again.

Each time you press the hotkey to stop, VoicePrivate transcribes on your computer and pastes the finished text at your cursor. Text does not appear while you are still speaking. It arrives in one block when you stop, so read the values and doses once and sign.

Getting the text into your EHR

VoicePrivate works with any EHR that accepts a paste, because it pastes through the clipboard rather than through a plug in. That includes Epic, Oracle Health (Cerner), athenahealth, eClinicalWorks and NextGen. Nursing home and assisted living groups often chart in a long term care system such as PointClickCare; any note field you can paste into works the same way. The workflow is the same everywhere:

1. Click into the note field, such as the HPI, assessment or plan box.
2. Press Command+Shift+Space on Mac or Ctrl+Shift+Space on Windows and dictate.
3. Press the hotkey again. The text is pasted where your cursor is, and with Auto-copy to clipboard off, the default, your previous clipboard contents are put back.

If your EHR runs inside Citrix or another remote desktop, the remote session must allow clipboard redirection from your computer. Most IT teams can turn this on per user. VoicePrivate runs on the local Mac or PC, not inside the remote session. The EHR dictation guide covers each system.

Privacy, stated as facts

VoicePrivate processes speech on the computer it is installed on. Audio never leaves the computer and nothing is sent to a cloud service for transcription. Your notes live in your EHR, the same as if you had typed them. Your practice still decides how the EHR itself is secured and what agreements it has with vendors. With Auto-save transcriptions on, which is the default, each dictation is also kept in the app's Library on that computer. Turn it off in Settings if you do not want a Library copy. Auto-copy to clipboard is off by default; if you turn it on, the text also stays on the clipboard after it is pasted, so leave it off if the EHR should hold the only copy.

Price

Healthcare Edition is $297 a year or $34.99 a month for one clinician, on Mac or Windows. Every specialty vocabulary is included. There is no free trial. Individual monthly and annual plans have a 30-day money-back guarantee on the first payment. Practices with 2 to 20 clinicians can buy team seats.

Geriatrics dictation questions

Geriatric care overlaps with neurology dictation for dementia, psychiatry dictation for late life depression, nursing dictation for long term care and physical therapy dictation for falls. For primary care, see dictation for doctors.