Specialty training logbook for busy doctors

Stop scrambling before appraisals. Enjoy a review-ready portfolio without the headaches.

Trusted by clinicians at hospitals worldwide since 2013
The Struggle

Documentation chaos shouldn't derail your training

Every specialty trainee knows the struggle: excellent clinical work, chaotic documentation.

The evidence scramble

Months of experience scattered across notebooks, sticky notes, spreadsheets, and half-remembered cases. When review time looms, the evidence hunt is a nightmare.

Manic shifts, endless demands

You're managing full patient loads, on-call shifts, and study. The last thing you need is to spend hours finding evidence to prove your skills.

Assessment stress

Every specialty has different competency frameworks, evidence requirements, and assessment formats. Miss something crucial and your training progression suffers.

The Solution

Turn logbook stress into training success

Alessia captures everything that matters for your specialty training in one intelligent platform. Log clinical work in seconds, build portfolios as patient care happens, and stay assessment-ready.

Everything in one place

Procedures link to cases, cases link to sessions; smart tagging means you'll lose a case again. Everything connects and builds a complete training story.

Log while you work

Log procedures in seconds between wards. Offline mode works in hospital dead zones. Come back later and deepen entries to capture the granularity your training requires.

Always review-ready

Real-time tracking shows exactly what you've done. Whether you want reports for official e-portfolios or standalone submissions, your logbook stays export-ready.

Alessia has been my saving grace. I can quickly log procedures on shift and fill in the details later. I pegged my cases against the EM CiPs - it was easy to see what I had covered and where I needed more exposure.

Dr Ben Ward
ST4 Emergency Medicine
UK
Alessia icon logo.

Built specifically for specialty training needs

Assessment-Ready Reports

Customise ranges and export PDF and spreadsheet records for submission. Whether you need a simple logbook count or extensive reports for specialty board reviews - you're always prepared.

Connected Evidence Chains

Link procedures to cases, cases to ward rounds, reflections to any entry. Build evidence stories that show progression, depth and clinical insight, not just activity counts.

From -iatry to -atrics and everything in between

If you're specialty training in it, we cover it. Go ahead and find yours.

FAQs

Weighing up fit and flexibility? Start here with our short answers to the questions specialty trainees ask most.

Why should I use Alessia instead of a free logbook?

Free tools are fine for basic counts, but they rarely prepare you for rigorous training reviews or international recognition. Alessia builds your portfolio into a coherent story of responsibility and growth, covering the full breadth of your clinical world. Thoughtful tooling - like tags to group work meaningfully, competencies to anchor evidence to your training scheme, and goals to define what "enough" looks like - makes progress visible and useful. Most free products don't offer this structure or clarity, leaving you to juggle spreadsheets and manual cross-checks.

What workplace based assessments do you support?

Alessia currently supports 11 assessment types:

  • Acute Care Assessment Tool (ACAT)
  • Case-based Discussion (CbD)
  • Direct Observation of Procedural Skills (DOPS)
  • Mini Clinical Evaluation Exercise (Mini-CEX)
  • Outpatient Care Assessment Tool (OPCAT)
  • Procedure-Based Assessment (PBA)
  • Objective Structured Assessment of Technical Skills (OSATS)
  • Multi-Source Feedback (MSF)
  • Teaching Observation
  • Patient Survey
  • Appraisal

For now, workplace based assessments can be logged by uploading your own digital or scanned file, and annotating the entry with the assessor, date, related clinical entry, completed form, overall grade and competencies where applicable.

However, we are in the process of building each format into a fully structured digital assessment workflow that will include scheduling, reminders and supervisor feedback loops. Our assessment framework will be configurable, so you can add college, speciality, pathway or organisation-specific workplace based assessments (WPBAs) with their own graded domains, rating scales, outcomes, entrustment levels, competency verification, feedback and evidence requirements. We will also be expanding our Assessment log category to include:

  • Consultation Observation Tool (COT)
  • Quality Improvement Project Assessment Tool (QIPAT) / audit assessment
  • Clinical supervisor/end-of-placement reports
  • Observed Clinical Activity (OCA)
  • Assessment of Procedural and Surgical Skills (APSS)
  • Random Case Analysis (RCA)
  • Mid/end-of-term assessments
  • Entrustable Professional Activity (EPA) assessments

If there are any assessment types we are missing, just let us know.

Is offline logging supported for low-connectivity settings?

A million times yes.  Alessia is designed for busy clinical environments where Wi-Fi and mobile data aren’t always reliable. You can log any entry or session offline in the mobile app. All data is stored securely on your device and automatically syncs with your account as soon as you’re back online. This means you can keep logging seamlessly in theatres, radiology suites, or any other low-signal setting without losing a record.

Does Alessia cover every specialty?

Alessia isn’t limited to one branch of medicine. It has been built to support the entire breadth of modern practice - from angioplasty to z-plasty and everything in between. Our library of procedures and log entry fields are aligned to international medical coding datasets, so they offer extensive coverage for every clinical field.  The structure of Alessia allows for a wide breadth of entry types including various templates for different interventions and encounters, professional activities and clinical assessments. If there is something we have missed that is unique to your specialty, just drop us a note and we will add it in.

My work is mostly clinics and cases, not procedures - is Alessia still useful?

Definitely. Alessia is designed for the full scope of clinical and professional work. You can record patient encounters, ward rounds, clinics, CPD, audits, governance activity, teaching, supervision, research and much more - all in one organised portfolio. Tags keep any entry type filed in the right place and easy to retrieve at a later point.  Competencies will let you connect any clinical activity to your curriculum requirements, and goals will keep you on target whatever your clinical domain.

Can I add the specific detail my subspecialty needs?

Absolutely. Alessia is broad and flexible with hundreds of thousands of procedures drawn from international medical coding datasets, so most subspecialty work is covered. For extra depth and detail, you can add optional fields from our library (e.g. clinical context, procedure specifics, supervision, outcomes). If something you need isn’t there, suggest it - we review quickly and build popular requests into the product for the benefit of everyone.

Do I need to set a specialty in Alessia, or update it if my training changes?

No. Alessia isn’t locked to a single specialty. You log your work once and organise it the way you need - using your chosen fields, tags and (when relevant) the competency sets you choose. If your training or focus changes, you simply select the new competency framework and carry on. Your previous entries stay intact and can be viewed or reported separately by theme, role, site or timeframe. No resetting, no new logbook - your portfolio adapts as your career evolves.

Can I bring historic spreadsheets or logbooks with me?

At present there is no bulk import option for historic logbooks. However, we are aware of the challenge of portfolio portability and solving it is on our roadmap. We hope to offer a solution soon.

In the meantime, the practical approach is to start logging new work in Alessia from today, and, if helpful, recreate key examples from your history that best show scope and independence. Keep your original spreadsheets or PDFs traceable by storing them in Alessia's Documents repository and reference them with notes and #tags. Avoid months of backfilling, preserve the original dates and context, and maintain a coherent, credible portfolio going forward.

Will training bodies and hospitals accept Alessia reports?

Increasingly, yes - and it's the direction we're building towards: Alessia reports that training bodies and hospitals recognise as standard.

Acceptance varies, because each training body decides what it wants to see - which is why Alessia's reporting is both comprehensive and flexible.

Today, Alessia generates a full Portfolio Report (PDF) over any period you choose, consolidating your logbook entries, curriculum mapping, CPD and reflective practice - including:

  • activity snapshots and activity over time
  • procedures, broken down by training year, supervision level, urgency and month, with full procedure detail
  • clinical encounters and admissions, your case mix (specialties seen and presenting complaints), and patient demographics
  • curriculum capabilities and a capability evidence map
  • reflective practice, CPD, and competency and goal progress

You can also export the underlying data as CSVs whenever you need the raw figures.

We're actively expanding this report tooling with one goal - the least possible work for you. As you tell us what your training body or hospital needs, we build it in, so wherever possible you can tailor exactly what a report includes to match their requirements rather than rebuilding your evidence by hand.

Some training bodies will still ask you to enter data into their own online form. Where that's outside our control we can't remove the step - but we make getting clean, complete data out of Alessia as easy as possible.

Does Alessia capture non-clinical activities (CPD, teaching, quality improvement, leadership etc)?

Yes - we call non-clinical activities Professional Activities and treat them as first-class evidence. You can record teaching and supervision, audits and QI cycles, leadership and governance activity, CPD and research, then add notes, reflections and anonymised attachments where relevant. Use simple #tags (e.g. theme, audience, role, outcome) so items are easy to find later, and export concise summaries or date-bounded lists when a review panel or interviewer asks for them.  The result is a coherent picture of your contribution beyond direct patient care - ready to share without extra admin.

Can supervisors sign off my evidence?

Right now, you can add a supervisor's sign-off form to the exact case, procedure or session it relates to, so the endorsement travels with the work it supports.

We'll shortly be releasing supervisor sign-off loops so you'll be able to send any entry to a supervisor for review, track its status, and keep the approval linked to that entry. Soon you'll also be able to digitise all your Supervised Learning Events (SLEs), Workplace Based Assessments (WBAs), co-worker evaluations (MSF) and patient feedback cycles (PFCs). Supervisors will be able to provide input directly in Alessia, keeping evaluations, evidence and sign-offs all in one organised portfolio.

Can Alessia show me what I’m missing and help me plan next steps?

Yes - this is one of the things Alessia is built to do.

Right now, Insights shows you where your evidence is strong and where it's thin - your activity counts, case mix, all filterable by date, entry type, site and more. Competencies and Goals turn that into a plan: track your progress against any framework you've subscribed to, set your own targets, and see where you still need evidence. Tags let you group work your way, and reminders help you go back to deepen a quick log or add a reflection when you're off the floor.

Coming next, we're building peer comparison - so you can see how your activity compares with others in your field - and AI progression analysis that reads your portfolio against your goals and credentialing requirements to suggest practical next steps.

Can my hospital or training body pay for Alessia?

Alessia provides both individual and institutional subscriptions. You can buy your own plan, or your hospital or training body can sign up on your behalf. With institutional subscriptions, training bodies, hospitals or university programmes can gain faculty-level access to a full programme management platform that enables comprehensive oversight of trainee portfolios.

How does Alessia work alongside my training ePortfolio?

Alessia doesn't replace your mandated ePortfolio - it feeds it. Where mandated platforms usually require evidence at specific intervals or career milestones (e.g. annual appraisals), Alessia is your on-the-ground companion - a tool that helps you achieve portfolio depth and breadth by making logging habits easy, and giving real-time visibility. Use Alessia for fast, flexible logging and better organisation, then export procedure counts, activity summaries and competency-aligned reports (PDF/CSV) for submission. With Alessia your clinical experience is already structured, credible and ready to present.

What if my programme’s framework changes mid-training?

Training frameworks evolve, and Alessia is built to evolve with them. Your existing entries are never lost - you can keep everything you’ve logged and simply map it to the updated framework. With competencies, tags and goals, we make it easy to realign evidence and show progress against new requirements.

Can I collaborate with colleagues inside Alessia?

Collaboration is a big part of our product roadmap. Soon you'll be able to invite supervisors to sign off activities, tag colleagues and their roles in your procedural entries, cases and shifts, and even request structured multi-source feedback from the team. These additions are designed to keep your evidence authentic and connected to the people you work with, while still giving you a portfolio that feels organised and under your control.

Still have questions?

Juggling patient care and portfolios? We've got the portfolio part.

Join thousands of specialty trainees who focused on patients, not paperwork.

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