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 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 stored separately from the AI, encrypted, on secure systems inside the United Kingdom, with access controlled and recorded. The AI service that helps write the drafts never receives it.

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. The transcript that comes back is stored encrypted inside the United Kingdom until your clinician deletes it.

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 to be stored encrypted inside the United Kingdom, where your clinician can delete it at any time.

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.

Your clinician may have used a different AI tool with you before, and these tools vary a great deal in what they do with your information, so it is worth being clear about what is specifically different here. Your name is replaced with a placeholder on your clinician's device before any content reaches the AI, rather than being sent straight to a cloud service the way many earlier AI scribes worked; the storage and processing stay inside the United Kingdom, with live transcription handled in Ireland and nothing routed through the United States; the transcription provider keeps no audio after the session under a zero-retention agreement; and everything Cogent stores is encrypted and held in the UK with access controlled and recorded.

If anything here sits differently from what your clinician told you about the previous tool, the right person to ask is them, because they will have the original consent paperwork to hand and can talk you through what changed and why they made the switch.

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.