AI scribe wars heating up

Lyrebird Health and Heidi Health are leading the charge in driving AI scribe use locally, but each appear to have very different paths to market.

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Heidi Health’s announcement that it has completed a deep integration with cloud-based patient management and in-patient EHR platform MediRecords suggests that the well-funded local AI start up (two rounds and about $15 million, mostly via Blackbird Ventures) is progressing as one of at least two serious and well backed emerging generative AI medical plays in Australia, the other being Lyrebird Health.

After securing backing from major GP patient management system vendor Best Practice and integrating with that platform in February this year, Lyrebird Health, which only started as a company in February last year, has rapidly risen to prominence based on innovative and agile generative AI based tech, the significant market share of the Best Practice platform and a lot of co-marketing activity this with the platform.

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In the past Best Practice has tended to stick with its EHR knitting, leaving more specialised adjacent technology to its core billing and HER system to integrations by other vertically focussed groups such as HotDoc for appointments and Healthshare for a specialist directory and pre-consult data. All up the group has well over 30 integrations around the core PMS hub.

But the company has come to view AI as so pivotal to the core functionality of its product and user experience going forward that it chose to invest in and partner directly with Lyrebird and integrate it deeply as a centre piece of a new era of rapidly evolving productivity functionality for the platform.

The decision represents a major strategic shift for the group which was started by Dr Frank Pyefinch after he abandoned the original product he built up, Medical Director, in 2004, to the company that had acquired it from him and his partners.

Chief Product Officer with BP, Danielle Bancroft, predicts that on top of the scribing functionality now available in the system, AI will soon be driving significant efficiency gains for clients in areas such as complex billing and disbursement, front of office admin and booking, and eventually, within a strict governance framework, clinical decision support.

MediRecords, as a cloud first vendor, isn’t a major player in GP market (yet?), but it has a significant presence in the rapidly emerging virtual care market and now a growing footprint in small hospital and community based in-patient services with an EHR and admissions and outpatient module that can talk directly from a primary care setting into a hospital and back out again to the community.

Heidi Health founder Dr Thomas Kelly told us that the profile of MediRecords with its cloud-first platform, footprint in virtual care, growth into the smaller hospital market and significant government contracts (including a contract with Defence for an interoperable whole of defence forces health system – JP2060) made the vendor a good place to start its inevitable journey of integrations with key local medical software platforms.

With a Heidi subscription, MediRecords users will now be able to launch AI ambient technology from within their clinical dashboard, enabling consultations to be instantly turned into templated notes for review by the user.

Once reviewed, the notes are automatically added to MediRecords’ Today’s Notes field.

Heidi Health technology is GDPR and APP (Australian Privacy Principles) compliant and ISO27001 and SOC2 accredited for security.

“There are really interesting and creative people and companies working with MediRecords, like Dr Max Mollekopf, for instance (a Newcastle based GP using innovative telehealth models in his practice) that suit the way we are building out because clients like these like to test boundaries,” said Dr Kelly.

He said that clinicians spend on average more than two hours per day on tasks other than patient care, potentially losing up to $66,000 annually as a result. AI scribe technology would enable many of them to work up to twice as efficiently, he said

Dr Kelly said that eventually he believed that Heidi AI would be made available on most of the major primary care and specialist platforms, including BP, Medical Director and Genie, but that the market for AI in medicine in Australia was far broader than general practice and specialists.

He said Heidi AI was gaining rapid traction in certain areas where scribing offered definitive efficiencies such as mental health consultation environments and paediatrics, but it was also now starting to be used in several hospitals across the country. It is also used by vets and dentists.

Lyrebird Health announced last month that it was being trialled by more than 70 Gold Coast Health medical specialists to improve productivity in its outpatient departments, signalling the intention of the group to move into the hospital market.

The hospital sector, which is experiencing a major and ongoing workforce crisis across a range of key health professionals, might end up being a major market for both local start-ups which are proving to be far more agile in development and integration and less expensive than some of the big incumbent transcription vendors such as Nuance (Microsoft) and the big global EMR vendors.

Dr Kelly said that most of the major hospital networks were recognising that they needed to get out in front of the technology as much as they can in order to avoid frustrated staff using AI without them knowing.

He said there was likely to be a wave of change in how hospitals used AI in the next few years given its potential and utility.

While Lyrebird is backed primarily by a mainly GP based software platform vendor (albeit the biggest one) Heidi Health is funded by venture capital to the tune of $15 million so far.

These are two very different ways to grow medical software start up groups.

Heidi Health will likely have a lot more cash available than Best Practice can front up in the short term for Lyrebird, but Best Practice, with its shareholding in business analytics platform Cubiko and FHIR-based API middleware group Halo Connect, is able to bring a lot of IP and synergy to help Lyrebird on its journey.

Another key market differentiator between the two vendors might be Heidi Health’s freemium model.

The base version of Heidi Health is free and this has created a rapid uptake of clients the group may never have seen if they ran a mainly subscription-based or paid model.

Dr Kelly said it was a strategy from the playbook of local design and graphics unicorn Canva, which started out as a light, web-based, free product that emulated the most popular characteristics of expensive Adobe platform design products. Today, Canva is Adobe’s major competitor globally.

The strategy has worked globally for Heidi so far. It now has 60% of its users outside of the Australian market – 30% in the US, 20% in the UK and 10% in other countries – many of them now converted to premium paid versions of the platform.