Announcing Lorraine Chat

Today we are launching Lorraine Chat: clinical AI built for South African practice. For the last year we have spent most mornings sitting with clinicians — in clinic, on call, in the tea-room — asking the same question in different ways. Where does reasoning support actually help, and where does it just add friction? Chat is the first product we are comfortable shipping as the answer.

What Chat is

Chat is a clinical reasoning tool. You describe a case, ask for differentials, check a dose, or look up a guideline — and Chat answers with citations you can open: PubMed, the South African Standard Treatment Guidelines and Essential Medicines List, NDoH and NICD guidance, and the SAMJ. The aim is that every substantive claim carries a source you can audit in seconds rather than take on faith. It also runs the clinical calculators we reach for most often at the bedside — CHA₂DS₂-VASc, CURB-65, Wells, eGFR, weight-based paediatric dosing — among several hundred others.

What Chat is not

Chat is not a medical device and it does not replace clinician judgement. It is decision support — a faster way to think alongside a second opinion that has read the guideline and the recent trial. The moment you stop asking questions, Chat stops being useful.

Tracking your CPD activity

Chat keeps a record of the reasoned clinical queries you run, so the work you already do when you check a guideline or re-read a trial leaves a trace instead of vanishing. To be exact about what that is: Lorraine may track eligible learning activity for CPD-related records while approval or accreditation is pending. Tracking does not guarantee that any professional body, employer, regulator, or accreditor will recognise the activity as CPD.

Try it at chat.uselorraine.co.za. Practices and hospitals who want to talk about a team deployment can reach us at institutions@uselorraine.co.za.