Sue Ryder and Heidi bring clinical AI into hospice care
We are pleased to announce a five-year partnership with Heidi, an AI-powered medical scribe company, to bring clinical AI into Sue Ryder community services and hospices, freeing clinicians to spend more time with patients and families in one of the most significant deployments of clinical AI in UK hospice care to date.
The initiative, made possible by government funding, will provide Sue Ryder’s seven healthcare services with access to Heidi's AI scribe, helping automate clinical notes, letters and forms so teams can spend more time face-to-face with patients and less on paperwork.
Heidi’s AI clinical scribe, recently added to the new NHS‑approved Ambient Voice Technology list, is already used at scale across the NHS. Over half of NHS GPs use the tool to document patient consultations, which has been deployed in 15 NHS trusts and is at the heart of 1.5 million appointments every month.
Sue Ryder will use the partnership as a cornerstone of its digital transformation programme, spanning its community teams, inpatient care, and bereavement services. Rollout will begin over the coming months, with teams working service by service to embed Heidi into everyday practice.
As part of the Sue Ryder agreement, Heidi will also contribute £10,000 annually to support the charity's work through fundraising activities, helping to raise awareness of the role that safe AI can play in expanding clinical capacity.
This marks a significant moment for the hospice sector, where complex needs, longer consultations and multi-disciplinary teams create some of the heaviest documentation burdens in healthcare. Bringing ambient AI into these settings at scale is designed to protect clinical time, improve clinicians' workplace wellbeing, and support more consistent record-keeping.
Melanie Craig, Chief Operating Officer at Sue Ryder, said:
“Palliative and end-of-life care clinicians are under huge pressure, balancing complex care with rising demand and limited resources. We cannot afford for their time to be swallowed up by admin. Partnering with Heidi will help us give precious time back to the bedside, while modernising how we work across our community services and within our inpatient settings."
"We will be working closely with our clinical teams as we roll out Heidi so that the technology genuinely reflects the realities of palliative and end-of-life care, both at home and in our hospices. If we can show that AI, used safely and thoughtfully, improves both the care we provide and the experience of our staff, we hope it will give other hospices the confidence to follow.”
Heidi already supports more than 2.3 million consults each week in 110 languages across 190 countries. In the UK, it has rapidly scaled ambient AI use across primary care, independent hospices and home care, with clinician adoption driven by specialty specific templates, flexible workflows and enterprise grade reliability.
Dr Hannah Allen, Chief Medical Officer at Heidi, said:
“Bringing ambient AI into hospice care at this scale is a significant moment for the sector. Sue Ryder is showing that you can be both patient-centred and pioneering, using technology to protect the time and headspace clinicians need to care.
We will be working side by side with Sue Ryder's teams to tailor Heidi to different services, track impact and continually refine how AI is used on the frontline. Our ambition is that the evidence from this rollout - combined with results from other hospices and home care providers - will help set a new benchmark for safe, effective use of AI in palliative and end-of- life care across the UK.”
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