Heidi's medical scribe lands at the Royal Children's Hospital

The Melbourne company's AI note-taker is now running inside one of Australia's largest paediatric hospitals. The claim it is selling is a concrete one: nearly an hour a day back for every doctor.

The Royal Children's Hospital (RCH) in Melbourne has deployed Heidi Health's AI scribe across its paediatric services, one of the more significant domestic wins yet for a company that has spent the past year expanding hard overseas.

Heidi's software listens during a consultation and handles the live transcription and note-taking, with the aim of cutting the administrative load that pulls clinicians away from patients. The company markets the product as an "AI Care Partner" and says it is now available in more than 110 languages across 116 countries.

The pitch to a hospital is a measurable one. According to Heidi's 2025 Impact Report, based on real-world deployments, doctors recover an average of 59 minutes a day when the software takes on their documentation. In a paediatric setting, where a clinician is often managing an anxious child and a worried parent at once, the time handed back is also attention handed back.

"Healthcare is at its best when a paediatrician can look a child in the eye instead of a screen, when a nurse can be fully present with a family in crisis," said Dr Thomas Kelly, chief executive and co-founder of Heidi Health.

The RCH deployment comes as Heidi scales well beyond Australia, with partnerships across the United Kingdom, United States, Canada, New Zealand, France, Spain, Germany, Ireland, South Africa, Singapore and Hong Kong. The company has the funding behind it to move at that pace. Its US$65 million (about A$99 million) Series B in October 2025, led by Steve Cohen's Point72 Private Investments, valued the business at US$465 million (about A$700 million) and took total funding raised to close to US$100 million.

Healthcare remains one of the hardest environments in which to deploy AI well, because the stakes are high and the tolerance for error is low. A scribe that mishears a dosage produces a note a doctor has to catch. For now Heidi sits on the safer side of that line, documenting the consultation rather than making decisions within it, and that is a large part of why hospitals have been willing to let it into the room.

A rollout inside a hospital like the Royal Children's is a different order of validation from a startup pilot. It means procurement, clinical governance and risk committees have all signed off, and that is the hard yard in health tech, not the technology itself. The 59-minutes-a-day figure is the number doing the selling, and if it holds up in a demanding paediatric setting it becomes very hard for other hospitals to ignore. The question we would keep in view is how far Heidi pushes past documentation. Transcribing a consult is low-risk. Prompting or acting on care decisions is not, and that is where the regulators get involved. We expect Heidi's next move to be a larger raise aimed squarely at that next step.