Heidi Health Review 2026: The Best Free AI Scribe, and the New Fine Print That Pays for It

Heidi is the AI scribe most clinicians try first, mainly because it costs nothing to start. The free plan gives you unlimited ambient transcription and notes. Heidi says it now supports about 2.8 million patient visits a week in 110 languages. In the UK it dominates: in one national survey of GPs, 86% of those using an AI scribe were using Heidi.

Two things changed in the past month. First, Heidi launched Heidi II in late September 2026. It is an agent platform that tries to handle the work around the note: chart prep, referrals, recalls, follow-ups, and even operating your EHR on screen. Second, Heidi published new Terms of Use, a new Privacy Policy, and a new BAA, all dated September 29, 2026. They spell out how the free plan is paid for. The deal is better than its reputation in some ways and worse in others.

This review covers what Heidi does well, what the evidence actually shows, what the plans really cost, and the clauses a US practice should read before recording a patient. We checked Heidi's own pricing page, legal documents, and help center on October 20, 2026, and read every peer-reviewed study we could find that names the product.

Quick verdict

Heidi is the best free AI scribe for a US clinician who is evaluating, low-volume, or works in a specialty with unusual note formats. Its templates are very flexible, its language support is the widest in the category, and its independent transcription benchmarks are the best of any commercial scribe we've seen tested.

But the free plan is now explicitly funded two ways. In the US it may show labelled sponsored content, and Heidi may use de-identified data from your free-plan notes to train its models. Paid individual plans exclude both. If either bothers you, the honest comparison is Heidi Clinician at $110 a month billed annually (or $150 month to month) against Freed and other paid scribes, not "free versus paid."

What Heidi is in 2026

Heidi Health was founded in Melbourne and now markets itself simply as "Heidi." The core product is still an ambient scribe. It listens to the visit, transcribes it, and drafts a note from a template you choose or build. The product range now has four parts:

• Scribe. Ambient documentation and dictation, with documents generated from the visit: patient instructions, referral letters, care plans, discharge letters. A Translation feature lets you hold the visit in one language and document in another. Heidi's own Product Terms say it is meant only for clinicians who are fluent in both languages.
• Evidence. AI answers to clinical questions with citations. Heidi says its sources include NEJM, Wiley, Cochrane, and BMJ Group content. Paid plans get unlimited answers under a fair-use policy.
• Agents and Routines (Heidi II). Plain-language tasks and scheduled multi-step routines: pre-charting for tomorrow's schedule, summarizing follow-ups, drafting referral emails. They can work through connectors to Gmail, Google Calendar, Microsoft 365, and EHRs. Computer use lets Heidi operate your EHR's screen directly when there is no API connector. Heidi says the agentic features are rolling out in the US, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, and are withheld from the UK and EU for now.
• Comms. An AI assistant for administrative patient calls. If you're considering it, read our AI voice-agent compliance guide first.

Heidi also ships a desktop app for macOS and Windows. Its main selling point is capturing telehealth audio straight from the call. That matters because browser-based capture can miss the patient's half of a video visit. We explain why in our telehealth scribe guide.

The company is well funded. Startup Daily reported on September 22, 2026 that Heidi raised a US$100 million Series C led by Blackbird, plus a separate US$240 million growth investment from General Catalyst's Customer Value Fund, and that annual recurring revenue reached US$50 million in April 2026. A scribe vendor with that much runway is unlikely to vanish in the middle of your contract. It is also under pressure to grow revenue, which is the context for the free-plan terms below.

Pricing: what Heidi actually charges

Heidi's US pricing page, checked October 20, 2026, lists three plans:

• Free: $0. Unlimited transcription and notes with standard templates, plus task management. Advanced templates, Ask Heidi, documents, coding, patient linking, and Dictate come with limited usage. Heidi's help center describes this as a shared pool of 10 actions a month. Agents get a small weekly trial allowance.
• Clinician: $150 per user per month billed monthly, or $110 per user per month billed annually (Heidi shows the annual saving as $480 a year). Adds advanced and custom templates, unlimited Evidence, full-text journal access, Routines for pre-charting and billing-code support, and a monthly agent allowance. There's a 14-day free trial. Prices exclude sales tax.
• Teams: custom pricing. Shared templates and sessions, team controls, one invoice, free seats for assistants and admin staff, EHR integration, and optional SSO and enterprise governance.

Since Heidi II, paid seats come in two sizes. A Max seat has five times the agent usage of a Standard seat. For Clinician it's listed at $409 a month, or $299 a month billed annually. Heidi states that scribing, note editing, document generation, and Evidence queries never count toward the usage limit, and that it never charges overages. When you run out, agent features pause until your billing anniversary.

Some practical notes:

• Most solo clinicians don't need Max. It's priced for people who run computer use or per-visit pre-charting all day. Heidi's help center says computer use is the "heaviest" consumer of usage, and a daily Routine runs about 20 times a month.
• Credit rates can change mid-subscription. Heidi's Product Terms let it change how many credits an action consumes during a subscription term, and Heidi "is not required to publish" the per-action number. The subscription price itself needs 30 days' notice before renewal. Agent usage is the part you can't fully predict.
• The cost of EHR write-back is unclear. Heidi lists EHR integration under Teams. Its integrations page also offers self-serve connectors for athenahealth and for eClinicalWorks (via Vim). Ask sales exactly which plan unlocks write-back for your EHR before you assume copy-paste is the only option.

For the rest of the market, see our AI scribe pricing guide. Most self-serve competitors charge less than $150 month to month: Freed's unlimited Core plan is $79.

The September 29 terms: what the free plan costs you

This is the part most reviews haven't caught up with. Heidi's new Terms of Use replace the version dated November 13, 2023. Section 4 is titled "Free plans: sponsored content and model improvement," and it opens plainly: "Our free plan is funded differently from paid plans."

Sponsored content in the US

Section 4.2 says free plans "may include clearly labelled sponsored content in some regions (currently the United States)." The Privacy Policy adds the guardrails:

• Sponsored content is chosen inside Heidi using "de-identified, segment-level topics derived from how our free offering is used," and Heidi says it does not use third-party ad networks to pick it.
• Sponsors never get your identity, queries, notes, transcripts, or health information. They receive only aggregate, de-identified reporting, "for example, the total number of views of their content by specialty."
• Heidi uses your professional details, such as NPI status and specialty, to decide whether you're eligible for the free plan and for sponsored content.
• The terms say sponsors "have no influence over the outputs the Platform generates for you."

These are stronger protections than we found in Glass Health's ad-supported tiers. Still, this is a clinical documentation and evidence tool showing sponsored content to clinicians, targeted by specialty. Drug and device makers are the natural buyers of that kind of placement. If your organization has a policy on industry influence, the free plan probably falls under it. Paid individual plans contain no sponsored content.

De-identified training on free-plan data

Section 4.3 says that on a free plan, Heidi may create de-identified information from your content, after removing anything that identifies you, your organization, or any patient. It may then use that information "to develop, train, test and improve our models, products and services." Heidi pairs this with three commitments:

• It does not use health information itself as training input.
• It will not try to re-identify de-identified data.
• It requires anyone it shares that data with to make the same commitment.

The BAA matches this. It forbids using PHI "as an input to train, fine-tune or otherwise improve any artificial intelligence model." It also says Heidi may de-identify PHI "only as permitted by the Agreement," and data that meets HIPAA's de-identification standard at 45 CFR 164.514 is no longer PHI. So on the free plan, de-identification is permitted, and the de-identified output can be used for training.

That is lawful under HIPAA: a covered entity can let its business associate de-identify data. It is also a choice your practice is making for its patients, so make it deliberately. The paid side is clear. Heidi says it does not train on content from paid individual plans, or on de-identified data derived from it. For organizations on a negotiated agreement, the Privacy Policy says no customer data is used to train any AI model.

Clinicians who remember Heidi's older blanket message, "we don't use your data to train," should note that it now applies only to paid plans.

HIPAA and the BAA: better than the rumors

Several third-party reviews say Heidi's free plan has no BAA, or that a signed BAA starts only at a team tier. Our own tool listing repeated that. Under the current documents, it's wrong.

Section 5.3 of the Terms says that if you are a HIPAA covered entity or business associate, "valid acceptance of these Terms includes execution of the BAA." No plan is excluded. Heidi's HIPAA page says it makes "a BAA available to every covered entity we work with." You get the BAA when you accept the terms, on any plan, including Free.

The BAA itself (also dated September 29, 2026) is fairly strong for a self-serve product:

• Breach notice within 72 hours of discovering a breach of unsecured PHI or a successful security incident. HIPAA allows up to 60 days.
• No sale of PHI, no marketing use, and no using PHI to select, target, or measure advertising.
• Subcontractor BAAs for any vendor that touches PHI. The subprocessor list is available from compliance@heidihealth.com.
• Patient access support: records in a designated record set returned within 10 business days of your request. That matters given the questions raised in our AI scribe recordings and right-of-access post.
• Return or destruction of PHI at termination, with backups destroyed within 90 days.

On retention, the Privacy Policy says audio is used to create the transcript and deleted as soon as processing is complete, unless you turn on a feature that saves recordings. Know whether anyone in your practice has enabled that, because a saved recording raises consent and access questions that a deleted one doesn't. Individual users control how long their transcripts and notes are kept. Organizations can set auto-deletion between 1 and 90 days. US data is hosted in the United States.

Heidi also cites SOC 2 and ISO 27001 certifications. For what a BAA does and doesn't cover, see what HIPAA compliance actually means for AI tools.

Three other clauses worth knowing

• Liability cap. On a free plan or trial, Heidi's total liability to you is capped at US$100. On a paid plan it's the fees you paid in the previous 12 months. That's standard for SaaS, but it puts the free plan's risk on you.
• Arbitration and class-action waiver. US users agree to binding individual arbitration with no jury and no class actions. You can opt out by emailing compliance@heidihealth.com with the subject "Arbitration Opt-Out" within 30 days of first accepting the terms. Existing users get 30 days from when the new terms take effect for them. If you want to keep your options open, send that email now.
• Agents need your approval. The Terms require you to approve any action before it creates or changes a clinical record, prescription, order, claim, or payment, or sends anything outside the practice. Heidi says it is not responsible for actions taken on your instructions.

Does the evidence back it up?

Heidi has more independent research behind it than most self-serve scribes, though nearly all of it comes from the UK, Ireland, and simulated settings. There is no randomized trial, and no published real-world study in US outpatient care. (For scribes that do have randomized trials, see our Nabla and Abridge reviews.)

Transcription accuracy, independent benchmarks:

• Surgical case reports (J Med Syst, 2026;50:145, published October 2026). A UK research team tested eight speech-to-text systems on 100 narrated surgical case reports. Heidi had the lowest medical-terminology error rate of the three commercial products: a domain word error rate of 5.67%, beaten only by an experimental GPT-based pipeline at 3.60%. Across all systems, 30% to 68% of transcripts contained at least one clinically significant error. These were most often in medication type and dose, and in lab results.
• Orthodontic records (J Dent Res, 2026;105(6):737–745). Across 200 narrated orthodontic summaries, Heidi was again the most accurate commercial system (domain word error rate 6.2%, overall WER 5.4%), and it produced no hallucinations. Every system made some clinically significant errors, and background noise made all of them worse.

Note quality and time, small studies:

• Simulated orthopaedic ward rounds (Surgeon, 2026;24(2):119–125). Seven first-year doctors produced 150 documents. With Heidi, progress notes took a median of 27 seconds versus 128 seconds, and discharge summaries 114 versus 459 seconds. AI notes also scored higher on the PDQI-9 quality scale (43.5 vs 41).
• Dermatology clinic letters (Clin Exp Dermatol, 2025;50(12):2425–2430). In four scripted cases, Heidi letters averaged 85% accuracy and took 27 seconds each. ChatGPT scored 92.6% but wrote harder-to-read letters. The traditional dictate-and-transcribe method scored 58.8% and took nearly 11 minutes. The authors noted that Heidi "occasionally omitted nuanced details."
• ENT ward rounds (BMJ Open Quality, 2026;15(1):e003910). A four-day before-and-after quality-improvement project found a statistically significant drop in documentation time.

Real-world users:

• UK GP survey (BMJ Health Care Inform, 2026;33(1):e101847). Of 1,003 GPs surveyed in August 2025, 141 were using an AI scribe, and 86% of them used Heidi. 80% reported less documentation time. But 32% said errors happened often or always, and 14% reported errors with significant-to-critical implications. Errors were most common in multi-party visits (38%), complex histories (35%), and non-English consultations (31%).

Heidi's own study: a medRxiv preprint (August 2026) comparing Heidi notes with junior clinicians' notes across five countries and 385 simulated visits found that Heidi's notes scored higher and carried fewer serious errors. All 13 authors are Heidi employees and Heidi funded the study. It also hasn't been peer reviewed. Treat it as vendor evidence.

Taken together, Heidi's speech recognition is among the best tested, and its notes compare well in simulations. But clinically significant errors still occur often enough that line-by-line review isn't optional, especially for medications, labs, multi-speaker visits, and non-English visits. Our AI scribe accuracy guide and language-access guide cover how to review for those errors.

EHR integration

Heidi's integrations page lists Epic (Hyperspace, Hyperdrive, and Haiku), Oracle Cerner (PowerChart and FirstNet), athenahealth (schedule sync and push to chart), eClinicalWorks (via Vim), and Altera. It also lists a long tail of practice-management systems, including CareStack, PracticeQ, Cliniko, Halaxy, and AlayaCare. Heidi II's computer use is designed to work in EHRs that have no connector at all.

Two cautions. First, "integrates with Epic" at a health-system level is not something a two-physician practice on a shared Epic instance can usually switch on itself. Second, be careful with computer use. An agent that clicks around in your EHR under your login is powerful, but the Terms make you responsible for reviewing and approving every change it makes to the chart. Start with draft-only routines.

The coding tool: unusually careful language

Heidi's Coding Tool suggests codes from the visit documentation. Its Product Terms are more explicit than most vendors' about not chasing revenue. Heidi says it does not "design, tune, train, market or measure it to increase Customer revenue." The tool doesn't favor higher-paying codes or flag when a visit is close to a payment threshold. Customers are also barred from using it to maximize reimbursement or support upcoding. A qualified coder remains the "coder of record."

That's the right posture given how closely payers now watch E/M distributions. See your AI scribe is changing how you bill. It doesn't move the audit risk off your practice, though. The Terms say outright that you remain responsible for every claim.

Who should use Heidi, and who shouldn't

Heidi is a strong fit if you:

• Want to test ambient documentation at no cost, and are comfortable with the free plan's sponsored-content and de-identified-training terms, or will upgrade
• Work in a specialty with unusual note formats. Heidi's template builder is the most flexible we've seen
• See many patients in languages other than English (with a qualified interpreter still in the room where one is required)
• Run telehealth visits and want system-level audio capture through the desktop app
• Are curious about agentic pre-charting and follow-up work, and will supervise it closely

Look elsewhere if you:

• Want the lowest paid price for unlimited notes. Freed Core ($79/month) or Twofold cost less than Heidi Clinician's $150 month to month
• Need tight EHR integration on a solo budget. Compare Heidi Teams quotes with your EHR's built-in scribe; see our Epic scribe analysis
• Are a health system that needs published US outcome data. Abridge and Nabla have randomized-trial evidence; Heidi doesn't yet
• Don't want sponsored content in a clinical tool and won't pay to remove it

How to set Heidi up safely

1. Decide on free versus paid before you record a patient. Read sections 4 and 5 of the Terms. If the practice won't accept sponsored content or de-identified training, start on the 14-day Clinician trial instead of Free.
2. Keep a copy of the BAA. It's executed when you accept the terms. Save a dated PDF of the Terms, the BAA, and the Privacy Policy in your compliance file.
3. Send the arbitration opt-out email within 30 days if you want to keep your court rights.
4. Check the "save recordings" setting. Leave it off unless you have a reason and a consent process to match. Our consent and recording-law guide and state AI disclosure guide cover what to tell patients.
5. Set retention deliberately. Shorter is safer, but make sure your final note lives in the EHR before transcripts auto-delete.
6. Review every note, with extra care for medications, doses, lab values, and multi-speaker or non-English visits.
7. Run agents in draft mode first, and check usage after your first week of any scheduled Routine.

The bottom line

Heidi earns its popularity. The free plan is still the most capable no-cost scribe available, the template system is excellent, and in independent tests it has transcribed medical terms more accurately than other commercial scribes. Heidi II is the most ambitious attempt yet to move a scribe into the work around the visit.

The free plan is free because of a trade the September 29 terms now state plainly: labelled sponsored content in the US, and de-identified training data. The BAA is real, and it's included on every plan. For a careful practice, the right comparison is the free plan's terms against $110–$150 a month, not $0 against $150. Read the terms, then choose.

Compare Heidi with other options in our AI medical scribe directory, or see side-by-side picks for family medicine and small clinics. For a direct matchup, read Heidi Health vs Freed AI. If cost is the deciding factor, start with our free and low-cost scribe guide.

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This review is informational only and is not legal, medical, or procurement advice. We are not affiliated with Heidi. Prices, plans, and legal terms were checked on Heidi's US website on October 20, 2026, and change often. Confirm current terms with the vendor, and the HIPAA implications with your compliance advisor, before you use any AI scribe with patients.