Heidi report says AI tool cuts NHS paperwork by 86%

Heidi has published a UK report on its AI medical documentation tool, covering more than 15 million patient visits.

The clinician-founded group says the report shows more than four million hours of clinical capacity returned to frontline teams across UK pilots, with documentation time cut by 86% on average. It also found that 95% of clinicians saw an improvement in burnout, while patient satisfaction was about 90% in services using the tool.

The figures come as health services face pressure to reduce administrative workloads and improve access without adding staff. Heidi says its software now supports more than half a million patient interactions each week across the UK.

Several examples in the report point to shorter turnaround times for routine paperwork. In one emergency department, discharge letter turnaround fell from 9.03 days to 2.6 minutes. Another service reduced a backlog of 2,700 clinic letters to fewer than 200 in four months.

A Same Day Emergency Care pilot unlocked up to GBP £95,200 in annualised clinical capacity, according to the report. At Dudley Group NHS Foundation Trust, Same Day Emergency Care and outpatient units freed up 221 hours of clinical capacity.

Primary care was another focus. At Modality Partnership, a GP super-partnership, documentation time during consultations was halved and paperwork completed outside contracted hours fell by 61%.

That shift was linked to lower stress among doctors. Documentation-related stress at Modality fell by 58% and work-life balance improved by 45%, while North East London Integrated Care Board recorded a 67% reduction in stress.

Community and hospice settings also featured in the report. One frailty team cut up to 12 minutes from each consultation, contributing to a projected annual saving of GBP £313,484 and a return of GBP £5.10 for every GBP £1 spent in one multidisciplinary team.

Growth story

The report comes as Heidi is also scaling rapidly as a business. Annualised recurring revenue rose from about USD $1 million to USD $50 million in two years, while total funding reached nearly USD $100 million at a valuation of about USD $660 million.

Its workforce has grown to more than 500 globally, with UK headcount up by more than 300% over the past year. Blackbird, one of Heidi's backers, has described it as the fastest-growing company in its portfolio since the early years of Canva and Leonardo.Ai.

Heidi was founded by clinicians and engineers in Australia and the UK. It is positioning itself against larger technology groups entering healthcare, including Google Health and Anthropic, arguing that its products were built around clinical workflows rather than adapted from general-purpose systems.

Its product suite has also expanded beyond transcription. Alongside its AI scribe, the company now offers Heidi Remote for wards and rural clinics, Heidi Evidence for point-of-care clinical questions, and Heidi Comms for patient communications across voice, text and chat.

Dr Hannah Allen, chief medical officer at Heidi and a general practitioner, said: "The data in this report reflects what we hear from clinicians across the NHS every day. Clinicians want to give patients their full attention but feel squeezed by rising demand and an ever-growing documentation burden. When AVT is introduced into real workflows with proper support, they can finally look up from the screen, listen properly and still finish their notes on time. This is not about replacing clinical judgement. It is about freeing up clinicians' cognitive load so that they can focus on patients, not paperwork."

The UK report draws on 10 de-identified independent service evaluations and pilot reports across acute, outpatient, primary care and community settings, alongside aggregate platform analytics on UK usage up to October 2025. The analysis covered areas including time saving, adoption, documentation quality, workforce wellbeing and patient experience.

The wider backdrop is a push within the NHS to adopt ambient voice technology more broadly. Heidi says NHS England has told integrated care boards and providers to roll out the technology in line with national guidance on safe AI deployment and planning frameworks.

That policy direction has prompted growing scrutiny of how these systems work in live care settings, especially around safety, data handling and whether they reduce workload rather than add another layer of process. The report is likely to be read through that lens, with much of its argument resting on evidence from local service evaluations.

Dr Thomas Kelly, co-founder and chief executive officer of Heidi, said: "AVT has moved from promise to practice. For years we have talked about the documentation crisis in the NHS. This report shows, using real services and real data, that this technology can turn that crisis into recoverable time for patients and staff.

"Across different care settings, we see the same pattern. When clinicians have access to a reliable AI partner that fits the way they already work, documentation time falls, backlogs collapse and burnout eases, while patients feel more heard, not less. As the NHS moves to deploy AVT at pace, this report offers a practical blueprint of what good looks like, and how to keep clinicians and patients at the centre."