Heidi used HIMSS26 as the stage for its most significant product and partnership announcements since launching its ambient AI scribe two years ago, arriving in Las Vegas with a new revenue cycle management partnership with R1, a freshly launched clinical evidence tool, and usage numbers that underscore the platform’s rapid ascent to global scale.
HOTSPOT TAKE
Heidi’s R1 partnership closes the longest-standing gap in ambient AI: connecting clinical documentation directly to revenue cycle management at the point of care.
From Scribe to AI Care Partner
Heidi launched in February 2024 as an ambient AI scribe designed to relieve physicians of documentation burdens, capturing clinical conversations, generating structured notes, and supporting pre-charting and post-visit task management. Two years later, the Melbourne-based company claims the platform supports more than 2.7 million visits per week across more than 200 specialties and is used in nearly every country.
Heidi now positions itself as an “AI Care Partner” rather than a scribe, a distinction reflected in three product pillars: its AI scribe, Evidence (a clinical decision support tool that surfaces relevant research during the encounter), and Comms (a patient communication and scheduling tool). According to the company, the platform supports physicians through every phase of the clinical day, from pre-charting through documentation to follow-up communications and clinical calls.
The platform integrates with Epic and Cerner, and is developing a partnership with MEDITECH, which company representatives described as particularly important in the Canadian market. A deep integration with athenahealth supports Heidi’s agentic solution for clinical calling and appointment reminders. Heidi also works with a range of specialty-specific EHRs in areas such as urology and gastroenterology.
Linking Documentation to Revenue: The R1 Partnership
The headline announcement at HIMSS26 was a strategic partnership with R1, a revenue cycle management company that works with approximately 1,000 provider organizations, including 95 of the top 100 U.S. health systems, and processes more than 270 million payer transactions annually.
The partnership integrates Heidi’s clinical documentation workflow into R1’s Phare Revenue Operating System, connecting clinical and financial intelligence at the point of care. Under the arrangement, Heidi users gain real-time visibility into payer policy information, prior authorization rules, and insurance eligibility during the encounter. Notes generated by Heidi are optimized for accurate coding and billing, aimed at reducing down-coding, missed billable procedures, and medical necessity denials. On the revenue cycle side, R1 receives higher-quality documentation entering billing workflows, which the companies say supports faster claim processing and more predictable reimbursement.
“Revenue management companies have historically had limited integration with clinicians, while scribe companies have lacked system-level payer data. This important partnership changes that.” — Dr. Thomas Kelly, Co-Founder and CEO, Heidi
“Revenue management companies have historically had limited integration with clinicians, while scribe companies have lacked system-level payer data,” said Dr. Thomas Kelly, Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Heidi. “This important partnership changes that. By connecting R1’s payer intelligence directly with Heidi’s platform at the point of care, we can deliver real-time billing and authorization guidance the moment it matters. Together we can close a gap that costs the whole system billions.”
The integration is designed to address what both companies describe as a fragmented revenue cycle in which clinical documentation and reimbursement management operate in separate silos, creating administrative overhead and financial leakage for providers. The companies frame the combined capability as a step toward a fully integrated “care-to-cash” operating layer.
Evidence and a Commitment to Ad-Free Clinical Intelligence
Weeks before HIMSS26, Heidi announced the launch of Evidence, a clinical decision support tool built directly into the platform. Evidence surfaces authoritative medical research and clinical guidelines during the encounter, drawing on partnerships with HealthPathways, EMGuidance, MIMS, the BMJ Group, NICE, and other regional and specialty sources.
Heidi built Evidence in part on Anthropic’s Claude AI models, citing the technology’s ability to interpret complex clinical conversations and synthesize dense medical literature with accuracy. The company also acquired UK-based AutoMedica, a clinical AI startup founded by vascular surgeons, to accelerate its regulatory capabilities and access the MHRA AI Airlock, a regulatory sandbox for healthcare AI in the United Kingdom.
A notable design decision: Heidi has committed to making Evidence permanently ad-free and independent, stating that clinical decision support must remain free from commercial influence. The company cites concerns about general-purpose AI platforms that have moved toward ad-supported models as a factor in that commitment.
“We believe that for AI to be a true care partner, the integrity of its evidence must be non-negotiable.” — Dr. Thomas Kelly, Co-Founder and CEO, Heidi
“We believe that for AI to be a true care partner, the integrity of its evidence must be non-negotiable,” Dr. Kelly said at the Evidence launch. “By committing to Evidence being ad-free and independent, we ensure clinicians can stay present with their patients, knowing their decision-making is built on pure clinical rigor, not a business model.”
Evidence is available free of charge to individual clinicians and includes traceable citations, allowing clinicians to verify sources directly.
Adoption Driven by Physicians, Not IT Departments
A recurring theme in Heidi’s HIMSS conversations was how the company has grown: not through traditional enterprise sales cycles, but through individual physician adoption that has spread organically to practice-wide and, in some cases, health system-wide deployment. Company representatives described a product-led growth model in which ease of use and clinical utility drive adoption without requiring deep IT integration as a prerequisite.
That model appears to be gaining traction with large organizations. Maine General Health’s chief information officer, Mark St. John, has noted publicly that Heidi delivered an immediate reduction in documentation time and improved patient focus during visits, while noting potential for longer-term gains as the platform matures.
According to the company’s own metrics, Heidi has returned 8 million hours annually to clinicians and reports 60 to 80 percent weekly activation rates among users, with the company attributing consistent usage to the platform’s ease of adoption rather than IT mandates.
Competitive Context
Heidi operates in an ambient AI documentation market that has grown substantially crowded over the past two years. Nuance Communications, now a Microsoft company, competes through Dragon Copilot, which has expanded integrations with Epic and announced new capabilities at HIMSS26 through partnerships with Wolters Kluwer’s UpToDate and Atropos Health. Abridge, backed by significant health system investment, has pursued a deeply integrated enterprise model with health systems including UPMC and Kaiser Permanente. Suki, which raised $70 million in Series D funding, targets ambulatory and specialty markets.
Heidi’s differentiation rests on several factors: its breadth of specialty coverage (more than 200 specialties with thousands of configurable templates), its global footprint (operating in nearly every country), and its platform strategy of adding clinical intelligence and revenue cycle capabilities on top of its scribe foundation. The R1 partnership, if it delivers on its documentation-to-reimbursement promise, could represent a meaningful competitive advantage in the U.S. enterprise market, where revenue leakage from documentation gaps is a persistent operational concern.
EHR vendors have also moved more aggressively into ambient documentation. Epic’s AI documentation capabilities now reach more than 85 percent of its customer base, according to company announcements at HIMSS26. Heidi’s response has been to position integration as an enhancement rather than a dependency, emphasizing that many physicians use the platform independent of EHR integration for its flexibility and specialty depth.
Expanding Beyond Physicians
Heidi’s immediate user base has been physicians, but the platform is already used by nurses in multiple healthcare settings, and the company is actively planning expansion to additional clinical roles, including pharmacy and radiology. Company representatives at HIMSS26 indicated that integrations with nurse-specific tools are in development, and that the platform’s core capabilities are applicable across clinical teams with relatively modest workflow adaptation.
For patients, the benefits remain largely downstream: shorter encounters with more attentive clinicians, more accurate documentation supporting appropriate billing, and better-informed clinical decisions at the point of care. As the platform expands into evidence delivery and revenue cycle integration, the potential for clinical decision support to reduce unnecessary procedures, improve diagnosis accuracy, and catch missing pre-authorizations before care is delayed adds a more direct patient-facing dimension to Heidi’s value proposition.
— This original article was created with AI support.
