Making healthcare more human: What we’re building at Heidi with Google Cloud

There’s a moment I’ve experienced countless times. I’m sitting with a patient, asking questions, listening carefully - and trying to document everything at the same time. I want to be present, to make eye contact, to truly connect. But instead, I’m typing, clicking, navigating checkboxes. And I can feel the disconnect growing in the space between us.

If you’ve ever been on the other side of that experience as a patient, you’ll know how it feels. You’re talking about something that matters to you, your health, and you’re not quite sure if your doctor is hearing you. The visit ends with a rushed summary and maybe a printout, and you leave feeling… a bit unheard.

It’s not the doctor’s fault. It’s the system.

Our healthcare system is filled with passionate, brilliant, dedicated people. But the weight of documentation, compliance, and bureaucracy is immense. It’s stealing time from clinicians. It’s draining them. And most importantly, it’s limiting the care we’re able to deliver.

This is the problem we’re solving at Heidi.

At Heidi, our mission is simple but powerful: to extend the clinician, wherever they are, and double the world’s healthcare capacity.

Heidi is an AI-powered medical scribe. It listens to conversations between clinicians and patients and automatically creates accurate, human-sounding documentation - ready in a click. No templates. No toggling. No transcription delays. Just documentation that sounds like your doctor wrote it themselves.

What this does, in practice, is free up time and emotional energy for clinicians to do what they do best: care.

We’re not trying to replace clinicians. We’re helping them show up more fully as humans.

Take the Queensland Children’s Hospital, one of the busiest paediatric departments in the country, with more than 25,000 patient visits a year. When they trialled Heidi, they moved from handwritten notes (yes, still!) to full electronic documentation. What followed was a significant uplift in documentation quality, efficiency, and care.

Dr Catherine Skellern, a developmental paediatrician with over 20 years of experience, saw the change immediately.

“She tried Heidi after a busy day, and it had an immediate impact,” I shared in my keynote. “It saved her 2–3 hours a day, allowed her to see four more patients, and restored the joy in her practice.”

She’s now championing Heidi across the hospital, working to personalise the experience for every clinician, whether it’s a junior doctor, a nurse practitioner, or the more resistant old-school consultants (and I say that lovingly, having worked with many of them!).

In specialties like developmental paediatrics, where you’re juggling children, parents, play therapy and interpreters for hours at a time, there’s simply no time to take notes as you go. Heidi has changed the game for clinicians like Dr Skellern, allowing them to focus on what’s in front of them, not the keyboard.

All of this is made possible through our partnership with Google Cloud. It’s the foundation that allows us to operate at scale - securely, reliably, and globally.

We’re serving clinicians in more than 50 countries, supporting nearly two million sessions a week. From emergency doctors in South Africa to multilingual consults across Asia, Heidi is delivering real impact.

Google Cloud’s AI Platform provides the clinically tuned models and speech-to-text capabilities that allow us to deliver accurate, context-aware documentation, even in noisy rooms, with multiple voices and diverse accents. Their Model Garden gives us the flexibility to blend Google’s own models with open-source and third-party options, always optimising for what clinicians actually need: quality, speed, and affordability.

And we’re just getting started. With tools like Agent Builder, we’re looking beyond documentation - towards a future of digital health concierges and other AI-driven support that helps reduce the cognitive and emotional toll on clinicians, while improving patient care at scale.

For those working to transform their industries with AI, my advice is this:

At Heidi, we’re not just building software. We’re building a future where healthcare is profoundly more human, unconstrained by admin time or burnout, and powered by empathy, not paperwork.

AI is not the enemy of empathy. In the right hands, it’s a tool to amplify it.

At Heidi, we believe AI can, and must, make care more human. That’s the future we’re working towards: one where every clinician can do their best work, and every patient feels seen, heard, and cared for.