Dr. Tom Kelly is a trauma surgeon, and everywhere, he sees doctors drowning in administrative work. He wanted change, so he set out to build it.
“We wanted to build an AI care partner that would stand alongside clinicians and take care of the admin so that individual providers, like me, can feel empowered to deliver the care which we dedicated our lives to,” he told TechCrunch.
Dr. Kelly teamed up with Waleed Mussa, with whom he had worked at a previous startup, and founded Heidi Health in 2021. The company began launching products in early 2024.
In just 18 months, he said, the company has returned more than “18 million hours to frontline healthcare providers from more than 70 million patient visits in 116 countries.”
The product, as promised, is an AI medical scribe that takes care of all the admin work that hassles doctors. It can transcribe and dictate notes, generate personalized patient summaries, and even track tasks so doctors no longer have a need for sticky notes.
Heidi both built its own AI model and builds on top of other models, such as Gemini. “This model agnostic approach means that we can optimize our accuracy, latency, and cost,” he said.
On Monday, the company announced a $65 million Series B led by Steve Cohen’s Point72. It also announced a new tool: an AI agent that calls patients on behalf of the doctor. The former Chief Medical Officer at Microsoft, Dr. Simon Kos, is also coming on board, along with Plaid’s head of revenue, Paul Williamson.
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The company has raised $96.6 million to date. Others in the round include Goodwater Capital, Headline, Blackbird VC, LG Technology Ventures, and Alumni Ventures.
“They had seen all the scribes before,” Dr. Kelly said of Point72. “They’d never seen product adoption and usage metrics like they’d seen in Heidi. They also loved that we were obsessed about the end user experience, because they saw most of our competitors were just doing top-down sales.”
The fresh capital will be used to help with product development.
Dr. Kelly hopes that giving doctors more access to AI tools will expand the capabilities of clinicians and remove the “drudgery” of their work.
He said most of the conversations in the medical world right now are shaped by what is happening in developed countries, “but imagine a world where any healthcare provider in the world can use Heidi to increase their clinical capacity, where they can practice in a war zone, or a refugee camp, or a region hit by climate change or simply an underserved community,” he continued. “Heidi can help them reach more patients and deliver better health care results.”
AI is transforming the health tech. Others in the medical scribe space, in particular, include DeepScribe, Ambiance Healthcare, and Abridge.
Heidi said it works with more than 2 million clinicians a week, ranging from hospitals to individual practices. It has a free version of the product with paid features, which Dr. Kelly believes has been a good lure for new customers.
He said AI is understandably going to change everything in healthcare. But at its core, humanity is still very essential, especially when it comes to maintaining and building trust.
“It’s about doubling the world’s health care capacity. That’s the true promise of AI,” he said. “We want to bring it about.”
Source: techcrunch.com
