Your GP is probably already using AI. Now it could talk to you about your medicines

In consulting rooms across Australia, millions of patients this year have been asked whether they mind artificial intelligence transcribing the appointment. About 40 per cent of GPs were using a tool of that kind late last year, according to a Royal Australian College of General Practitioners poll, up from 22 per cent in 2024. None of those products are approved by the Therapeutic Goods Administration.

They don’t need to be. The biggest of them is Heidi, built in Melbourne by a former vascular surgery resident, and it runs in about 2.8 million patient visits a week worldwide. It is exempt for a single reason: as it works today, it only writes things down.

That’s about to change. On Tuesday night the company announced it had raised $US340 million ($476 million) to roll out AI agents that will help tackle a global healthcare worker shortage.

The capital raise, led by Australian venture capital firm Blackbird, values the company at $1.26 billion, making it Australia’s latest “unicorn”, or billion-dollar tech start-up. American venture capital firm General Catalyst has separately provided a $US240 million loan to be repaid from revenue Heidi makes from investing that money into its business. Blackbird, its first backer, has repeatedly called Heidi the fastest-growing company in its portfolio, ahead of Canva.

In Australia, Heidi says its software has been rolled out at the Royal Children’s Hospital Melbourne, Children’s Health Queensland and Metro South Health in Brisbane, and that its annual recurring revenue grew from $US1 million to $US50 million in the two years to April.

“From the day I started Heidi, the ambition was always bigger than writing doctors’ notes,” chief executive Thomas Kelly said in announcing the raise. “I imagined that AI would sit alongside clinicians and complete real work under their supervision.”

In the near term, Kelly told this masthead, Heidi’s agents will take on work such as clinical coding, follow-up and checking on patients over time, with the doctor approving each task. The company will provide more detail on how this would work in practice in a larger product release within a month.

Tatiana Lowe, an emergency physician and medical director of telehealth service My Emergency Doctor, which uses Heidi, said she would hand off workers’ compensation certificates, the wording of death certificates and writing up medication charts to the app, though she would still sign the documents.

Lowe, whom Heidi made available for interview, would not hand over complex diagnostic decisions, or a conversation with a family at the end of a patient’s life. “It’s something that I might do twice a day, but this is the only time they’re ever going to hear it,” she said.