AI scribe colossus from Down Under gains foothold in Canada
Melbourne, Australia-based Heidi Health, a global leader in the AI scribe market, claims a 53% market share of general practitioners in its home market, a 60% market share in the United Kingdom and a global footprint covering 116 countries. In an October 2025 press release announcing the closing of a $65 million funding round, it boasted handling two million patient consults per week.
Here in Canada, it’s not on Canada Health Infoway’s list of nine pre-qualified AI vendors, or Supply Ontario’s vendor of record list of 18 AI scribes, but is one of six vendors recommended by British Columbia’s Provincial Health Services Authority and the B.C. Ministry of Health.
Among its users in Canada are Cambridge, Ontario’s North Dumfries Ontario Health Team, the Ottawa Institute of Cognitive Behavioural Therapy and Yukon’s Department of Health and Social Services.
According to Dr. Simon Kos, Heidi’s chief medical officer, the company has more than 5,000 primary care users in Canada and a presence in several hospitals, including Halton Healthcare. However, Heidi has a no-frills free version of its software that 79% of the company’s Canadian clinicians are currently using.
The company claims that all data is stored only in Canada in ISO27001-certified data centres, and that Heidi “adheres to all relevant provincial privacy legislation across Canada.”
Like most AI scribes, said Dr. Kos, Heidi started off as a simple scribing tool and is now expanding functionality beyond basic consult notes to include all of the downstream activities that contribute to the administrative burden responsible for clinician burnout.
As AI scribes expand functionality and move into downstream activities that have diagnostic, therapeutic, monitoring or screening implications, it’s more than likely that we’ll see regulatory agencies classify them as medical devices, resulting in more compliance and the need for evidence around the claims they make, predicts Dr. Kos. “We welcome that,” he added. “We think regulation will mature the market and provide additional safeguards and confidence for users.”
The Medical Post talked with two users of Heidi’s AI scribe to get a better understanding of its technology and what clinicians like about it.
Dr. Tommy Gerschman, a pediatric rheumatologist and sports medicine community specialist in North Vancouver, is no stranger to digital technologies. He has held several leadership roles with Doctors of BC and other organizations with a focus on using digital technologies to enhance the practice of community specialists.
“When AI scribes first started coming out two and a half years ago, I started playing around with them out of curiosity and realized that a lot of them were geared toward family practice,” he said. Specialties, he added, “have nuances about how they like to phrase and structure their notes. They’re deep rather than surface level and require more detail.”
Users of Heidi’s paid version—both primary care practitioners and specialists—are able to freely download from the company’s website hundreds of templates developed by the community of users to customize their notes and letters. For example, there are templates for ADHD assessments, hospital discharges, cancer diagnoses, referral letters, dermatology examinations and patient-friendly summaries. Alternatively, clinicians can create their own templates using Heidi’s chat-based template builder.
Having started using Heidi before it introduced its template community, Dr. Gerschman developed his own templates. If he wants his notes to include a patient’s medications, for example, he’ll specify the exact information he wants included, including the drug’s generic name, the dosage, the frequency and side effects. Other AI scribes also allow users to create templates, but Dr. Gerschman finds Heidi’s template programming intuitive and easy to pick up. If he wants to produce a patient-friendly summary for someone whose first language is Arabic, Ukrainian or Punjabi, he asks Heidi to translate it and makes sure to go over it with the patient to ensure it corresponds with their understanding of the consultation.
The Ottawa Institute of Cognitive Behavioural Therapy has approximately 50 contract staff, psychologists and trainees who began using Heidi in November 2024.
“We invested a lot of time into developing our fit-for-purpose templates that capture all the information we want documented,” said Dr. Pete Kelly, a clinical psychologist and the Institute’s chief financial officer. “We have certain types of letters that we would write to a physician, so we’re able to develop templates with parameters that are relevant to our particular specialty.”
Another feature called Ask Heidi allows clinicians to use voice prompts or text to have Heidi draft a referral letter or a history of present illness, including the onset of the disease, the duration, severity and associated symptoms. Dr. Gerschman said he uses it to query the transcript to add to the note or letter what the patient said about a question they were asked or include details from the conversation he wants included in the documentation.
Heidi also has a context feature that allows users to upload PDFs, word documents and images or dictate additional information a clinician wants to include in their documentation. “I’ll import into the context window things like previous reports, questionnaire data or any other third-party data or information that would be relevant to the documentation so it has the bigger picture,” said Dr. Kelly.
Of the hospital information systems and EMRs used in Canada, Heidi only has integrations with Epic and Accuro. Dr. Gerschman uses an integrated Accuro EMR, while Dr. Kelly uses the Owl Practice EMR, which is not integrated with Heidi, requiring him to copy and paste data from his EMR to Heidi and back to Owl Practice.
Like most AI scribes, Heidi saves clinicians time and reduces administrative burden. Prior to using AI scribes, Dr. Gerschman said it would usually take him five minutes to complete a note but if he was running late and left it to the end of the day or the weekend, it could take as much as a half hour. Now, using Heidi, it rarely takes more than five minutes whether he completes his documentation immediately after a consultation when its top of mind or after hours.
Dr. Kelly, who has no experience with other AI scribes, describes Heidi as a game changer. “The paperwork, notes and reports used to generate a huge amount of after-hours work,” he complained.” Now it feels like the job is finally manageable. I feel like it’s added years to my career because I’m not buried in reams of paperwork all the time.”
Whether Heidi’s “free forever” offer for its no-frills version will suffice for primary care providers and continue to win market share is hard to predict, but its deep pockets and customizable technology for specialists has given its revenue generating version a foothold in the Canadian market.
