Heidi Health vs Our AI Clinical Notes: An Honest Comparison

Heidi Health comes up in nearly every conversation we have with Australian healthcare providers about AI. And for good reason — it's an Australian-built product, designed specifically for clinical documentation, and it genuinely works well.

So this isn't a hit piece. We're not here to tell you Heidi is bad. We're here to explain why we built something different, who each approach is best for, and how to make the right call for your practice.

What Heidi Health does well

Let's give credit where it's due. Heidi is purpose-built for one job — turning patient consultations into structured clinical notes — and it does that job well.

• It understands Australian healthcare. AHPRA terminology, Medicare item numbers, the way Australian clinicians actually talk. It's not an American product awkwardly adapted for our market. It was built here, for us.
• The clinical note output is excellent. SOAP notes, referral letters, summaries — Heidi generates structured documentation from a consultation recording with impressive accuracy.
• The UI is clean and focused. You don't need to be technical to use it. Open the app, start your consultation, and get notes at the end. It's well-designed software.
• It integrates with some practice management systems. If your PMS is on the supported list, notes can flow directly into your clinical records.
• Medicare item number awareness. Heidi understands the Australian billing context, which is genuinely useful for documentation that needs to align with what you're claiming.

If clinical note generation is your single biggest pain point and you want something that works out of the box with zero setup, Heidi is a legitimate choice. We mean that.

Where Heidi stops

The limitation isn't what Heidi does — it's what it doesn't do. Heidi is a clinical notes tool. That's it. And for many practices, clinical notes are only one piece of the documentation puzzle.

Here's what we found when we looked at our own practice:

• Emails. Our clinicians dictate dozens of emails a day — to patients, specialists, labs, suppliers. Heidi doesn't help here.
• Referral letters. Yes, Heidi can generate referral letters from a consultation. But what about the referral you need to write from your desk, without a recorded consultation? You're back to typing.
• Patient letters and treatment plans. Post-visit summaries, consent forms, treatment explanations — all things our clinicians dictate regularly. Not Heidi's domain.
• Internal communications. Quick notes to reception, messages to the lab, task descriptions in our project management system. Voice is faster than typing for all of these.
• Any app, any field. Our clinicians work across a practice management system, email, messaging apps, and web portals. They need dictation that works everywhere, not just inside one app.

Heidi solves clinical notes. But clinical notes are maybe 30% of what our team actually types in a day. The other 70% still needs a solution.

What we built instead

We took a different approach. Instead of buying a specialised clinical notes tool, we built a general-purpose dictation system — VoxInk — and paired it with AI post-processing that can format transcriptions into whatever structure we need, including clinical notes.

The system works like this: hold a key, speak, release, and the transcribed text appears wherever your cursor is. Any app, any text field. Need clinical notes? We have prompts that structure the output into SOAP format. Need a referral letter? Different prompt. Need a plain email? It just types what you said.

It runs entirely locally. No audio leaves the machine. No cloud processing. No subscription fees. No per-user pricing.

And because it's part of our broader AI infrastructure, it integrates with everything else we've built — our custom AI tools, our email automation, our patient communication system. It's not an isolated product; it's a component in a larger system.

Head-to-head comparison

The cost picture

Heidi's pricing starts from around $69/month per clinician on paid plans, with more feature-rich tiers closer to $99/month. They do offer a free tier with limited consultations, which is worth trying before you commit.

Let's do the maths for a typical small practice with three clinicians on a mid-range plan at ~$89/month each:

• Year 1: 3 × $89 × 12 = $3,204
• Year 2: $3,204 (assuming no price increase)
• Year 3: $3,204
• Total: ~$9,612 over three years

That's nearly ten thousand dollars — for clinical notes only. It doesn't cover your email dictation, your referral letters, your internal comms, or anything else.

Our system costs $0 in ongoing fees because it runs on local hardware. There's an upfront cost in building and configuring it, but once it's running, there are no subscriptions, no per-seat charges, and no price increases. Add a fourth clinician? Same cost: zero.

When Heidi is the right choice

We genuinely recommend Heidi in these situations:

• You're a solo practitioner. At $69–99/month for one clinician, the cost is manageable, and the time savings on clinical documentation are real. If you're spending 20 minutes after each patient writing notes, Heidi pays for itself.
• Clinical notes are your only documentation bottleneck. If your team doesn't do much other dictation — minimal emails, few referral letters, no internal comms — then a purpose-built clinical notes tool is all you need.
• You want zero technical setup. Heidi is a polished product. Sign up, install, start using it. There's no infrastructure to build, no models to configure, no prompts to write. That simplicity has genuine value.
• You need Medicare item number awareness now. Heidi's understanding of Australian billing context is a real advantage that a general dictation tool doesn't replicate without custom work.

When building your own makes more sense

We went the custom route because our needs went well beyond clinical notes. Here's when that approach makes sense:

• You need dictation across your whole workflow. If your clinicians dictate emails, referrals, patient letters, internal messages, and clinical notes, you need something that works everywhere — not just inside one app.
• Data privacy is non-negotiable. If you don't want patient audio leaving your premises under any circumstances, local processing is the only answer. Cloud-based tools require trusting a third party with sensitive data, no matter how good their privacy policy is.
• You're already building other AI tools. If you've got custom AI for email management, phone answering, patient communication, or anything else, a custom dictation system slots right into that ecosystem. Heidi sits in its own silo.
• You have multiple clinicians and care about long-term cost. At three or more clinicians, the subscription costs compound fast. A custom system with no per-user fees becomes dramatically cheaper over time.
• You want to own the system. With Heidi, if they change their pricing, pivot their product, or shut down, you're stuck. With a custom system, you own the code, the models, and the infrastructure. It works as long as you want it to.

What about clinical note quality?

This is the honest gap. Heidi's clinical note generation is excellent because it's all they do. They've invested heavily in understanding clinical workflows, note structures, and Australian healthcare terminology. Their output is polished and clinician-ready.

Our approach — general dictation plus AI post-processing — produces good clinical notes, but it requires prompt engineering to get the formatting right. We've built prompts that output SOAP notes, structured dental exams, and referral letters, and they work well for our practice. But it took iteration to get there, and if you switched specialties, you'd need to adjust the prompts.

For most general practice and dental workflows, the quality difference is marginal. For highly specialised documentation with strict formatting requirements, Heidi's purpose-built approach has an edge.

The bigger picture

The real question isn't "Heidi or custom?" It's "what problem am I actually solving?"

If the problem is narrow — "I need better clinical notes from consultations" — Heidi is a strong answer. It's focused, polished, and works out of the box.

If the problem is broad — "I want to reduce typing across my entire practice, keep data local, and have everything integrated" — then a single-purpose clinical notes tool only solves a fraction of it. You end up paying for Heidi and still needing a dictation solution for everything else.

We've written more about this decision framework in our post on custom AI vs off-the-shelf software. The same logic applies here: off-the-shelf is great when your needs are standard. Custom wins when your needs span multiple tools and workflows.

The bottom line

Heidi Health is a good product built by Australians who understand Australian healthcare. If you're a solo clinician who just needs clinical notes to work, try their free tier. You might not need anything else.

But if you're a practice with multiple clinicians, if you need dictation beyond clinical notes, if you care about data staying on your premises, or if you're building a broader AI toolkit for your practice — there's a more cost-effective path that covers more ground.

We built that path for ourselves. If you want to see how it works, or talk through whether Heidi or a custom approach makes more sense for your situation, get in touch. We'll give you an honest answer — even if that answer is "just use Heidi."