What it means for you when your clinician uses Cogent Clinic.

Clinicians spend a lot of their working week writing session notes, letters, formulations, and supervision summaries, and Cogent Clinic is a tool that helps them do that writing more quickly and more thoroughly. It is not a therapist, does not make clinical decisions about you, and does not produce anything that ends up in your record without your clinician reading it, editing it, and signing it off, so your clinician remains the author of every document and the tool is only a draft-writer.

In plain terms, after a session your clinician types or, with your agreement, transcribes some of what happened, the tool produces a first draft of the note from that, and your clinician edits the draft into the version that actually goes into your record.

This is the part people tend to worry about most, so it is worth being specific about how it works.

Before anything is sent to the AI that helps write the draft, your clinician's browser identifies the personal details in what they have typed, including your name, any NHS number, a phone number, an email address, a postcode, a date of birth, and anything else that would point at a real person, and replaces all of them with neutral placeholders. What the AI sees is something like "[PERSON_1] described feeling overwhelmed after a conversation with [PERSON_2]", rather than your name or your relatives' names.

The piece of information that would turn those placeholders back into real names is kept on your clinician's device and protected by their account password, with Cogent itself never receiving a copy, so if Cogent's own systems were ever accessed without permission the identities those placeholders would connect to would not be there to be read.

If your clinician uses the live transcription feature during a session, the audio goes straight from their browser to a speech-to-text service inside the European Union, never routing through Cogent's own systems, with that service contractually prohibited from using audio or transcripts to train or improve any model, and the returned transcript is encrypted on your clinician's device with their password-derived key before it is saved anywhere, so the version Cogent stores is the encrypted one that it cannot read, held inside the United Kingdom.

The servers that hold your clinician's account, the AI that writes drafts, the encrypted transcript of any recorded session, the audit records, and the backups of everything Cogent holds all run in a data centre inside the United Kingdom, with nothing Cogent holds about you ever travelling to the United States or anywhere else.

If your clinician uses the live transcription feature, the audio is sent briefly to a speech-to-text service inside the European Union to be converted to text, with the audio not stored there, and the text comes back encrypted on your clinician's device so that the version Cogent holds is one that it cannot read, stored inside the United Kingdom.

A handful of ordinary business services that Cogent uses sit inside the European Union, including for example the service that sends billing emails to clinicians, and none of those services ever receive draft session notes, transcript text, or anything that would identify you.

The AI model is supplied to Cogent under contractual terms that prohibit your clinician's content from being used to train or improve the model, which makes the use of the AI a one-off drafting transaction rather than a long-term learning exchange.

The AI is also not allowed to diagnose you, recommend medication or treatment, predict risk, or introduce details your clinician did not write, and when your clinician is putting together a longer report that includes a clinical conclusion (an assessment report, for example) the AI organises your clinician's own reasoning into the shape of that report rather than reaching the conclusion itself.

Under UK GDPR you have rights over information held about you. Because your clinician is the one who decides what to write about you and keeps your clinical record, those rights are usually exercised through them. That includes asking for a copy of what is held about you, asking for something to be corrected, or asking for something to be deleted.

If you have asked your clinician and still have concerns, you can write to [email protected], or complain to the UK Information Commissioner's Office at ico.org.uk.

Cogent Clinic is a tool your clinician chose, in the same way they might choose a practice management system or a filing method, and how they document your work is something they and you can discuss, so if you would prefer that they do not use this tool when writing about you, you can say so and they can turn it off for your sessions.

Live transcription, if your clinician uses it, is treated as a separate consent, and your clinician should ask you whether you are comfortable with it before it runs.

For the detailed technical and legal documentation, including the privacy policy and the sub-processor register, see the Trust Centre.