The Brain: Synapse's in-app assistant

What you’ll do

Open the Brain, ask it a clinical question or tell it to do something (“add a task for Bed 4 at 1500 to recheck the BP”), and it either answers or shows a confirmation card first before it touches anything in your shift.

Why nurses use this

The five questions a working nurse types into Google ten times a shift (“max dose of IV labetalol,” “what’s a normal lactate,” “what does this CK-MB tell me”) turn into one sentence to the Brain. Same with the things you’d usually open three apps to do: “draft a handoff note for Bed 4,” “remind me to recheck the BP at 1500,” “summarize this patient for me.” The Brain already knows who your patients are and what your tasks look like. You don’t have to re-explain.

How to get there

Two entry points, two scopes.

• Whole-shift Brain: open the Brain screen from the main nav on the dashboard. It sees all your patients and tasks.
• Per-patient Brain: open a patient sheet → tap the Brain button inside it, and the conversation stays with that patient. A conversation about Bed 4 yesterday is still there today.
• Voice mode: tap the mic on the Brain input bar to open the voice overlay.
• From the Watch: dictate into the voice tab on the Apple Watch and your question goes to the Brain on your phone.

Step-by-step

1. Open the Brain. Either the whole-shift Brain screen or the per-patient Brain inside a patient sheet. The chat history is yours. It stays put when you close and reopen the app, and clears when you log out.

2. Type or talk. Type a question into the input bar, or tap the mic to switch to voice mode.

3. Voice mode. An animated circle appears and moves through phases (Connecting, Listening, Thinking, Speaking) so you always know where you are in the conversation. Tap the X to end. Switching to another app also closes the voice session.

4. Watch for the confirmation card. If the Brain proposes an action that would change your data (delete a patient, overwrite a note, mass-complete tasks), it shows an “Are you sure?” card in the chat. The action doesn’t fire until you confirm. Cancel and nothing happens. This is a deliberate guardrail, not a chatty prompt.

5. Use voice on the Watch. Open the voice tab on your Apple Watch, dictate a question. Your question goes to the Brain on your phone, exactly as if you’d typed it into the chat. Useful for “next task on Bed 4?” while you’re walking.

Tips from the floor

• The Brain knows your patients, but say their bed number anyway. “Recheck the BP on Bed 4 at 1500” is unambiguous; “recheck the BP on the chest pain admit” requires the Brain to guess.
• Voice mode is the move when your hands are gloved. It handles being backgrounded mid-conversation (you take a call, you come back) cleanly, and a stuck session recovers on its own. Reopen voice mode and keep going.
• The destructive-action card is not a nag. It’s there because the Brain can be confidently wrong. Read what it’s about to do before you tap Confirm.
• Per-patient Brain threads are separate from the whole-shift Brain. A conversation inside Bed 4’s sheet doesn’t show up in the main Brain screen. That’s intentional. Patient-specific context stays scoped.
• The Brain comes with your subscription, and the trial has the full experience. Day one of the trial is the right day to try voice mode. See the trial and subscription.

Common questions

Is my conversation private? Yes. Your conversations are private and go through secure, HIPAA-compliant servers. Your chat history stays with your account and clears when you log out. Don’t paste real PHI into the Brain anyway. Good habits matter more than any technical safeguard.

Can the Brain chart in the EHR for me? No. Synapse complements the EHR; charting still happens in your chart. The Brain can draft a note you then copy across, but it doesn’t write to Epic/Cerner/etc.

What if the Brain says something wrong? Push back in the chat (“that’s the IV dose, I asked about PO”). The conversation context is preserved and it corrects. If you find a serious clinical error, send feedback from Settings; we triage these directly.

Why does voice mode keep saying “Thinking”? That phase means it’s still working. If the voice session ever freezes, it recovers on its own. Close the voice screen and reopen it if you’re in a hurry.

Can the Brain run on the Watch alone? Voice dictation from the Watch goes through the phone. The Watch is the mic, the phone is the brain. You need both nearby.

Does the Brain work in Spanish / French / Portuguese? Synapse is available in English, Spanish, French, and Portuguese. The Brain is strongest in English today, and the other languages keep improving.

Where this fits in your shift

The Brain is the assistant under the dashboard. The dashboard tells you what’s there (patients, tasks, notes); the Brain helps you act on it (look things up, draft notes, set tasks, summarize a patient). For talking your way through adding a patient, see dictation. For the patient form itself, see SBAR intake.