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DigitalTCO vs Heidi
Both tools use AI to generate clinical notes from voice. But one was built by a dentist for dentists, and the other is a general healthcare platform adapted for dental. Here's what actually matters when choosing between them.
The short version
Heidi is a general-purpose medical AI scribe that covers 200+ healthcare specialties — including dental. DigitalTCO is built exclusively for dentists, by a dentist. Heidi gives you notes. DigitalTCO gives you notes, referral letters, patient letters, consent forms, reply letters, and reusable voice-triggered content — all from one platform. If you want a tool that understands dentistry at its core and handles your entire documentation burden (not just the notes), DigitalTCO is the more complete solution.
What is Heidi?
Heidi Health is an Australian AI medical scribe that supports clinicians across 200+ specialties, including dentistry. It listens to clinician-patient conversations in real time and generates structured clinical notes. Heidi supports over 30 languages, works online and offline, and offers both mobile and desktop apps. It's used by large health systems and solo practitioners alike, with ISO 27001 certification and compliance across HIPAA, GDPR, and NHS standards. Heidi has processed over 2 million consultations per week and claims to have returned 8 million hours to clinicians annually.
"Your AI Care Partner for Modern Clinical Practice"
What Heidi does well
- Broad healthcare coverage — works across 200+ medical specialties, useful if you work in mixed clinical settings
- Strong enterprise features — team management, shared billing, organisational dashboards
- Free tier available for individual clinicians with basic features
- Offline capability — continues transcribing if your connection drops
- Evidence search feature — clinical questions with citation-backed answers inline
- Chrome extension and EHR integrations for some medical systems
Where Heidi falls short
- Not dental-specific — it's a general medical tool adapted for dental, not built for it from the ground up
- No dedicated letter engine — can generate referral letters on request, but lacks the one-click letter generation, Molar Mail templates, or Cariespondence freeform dictation
- No consent form generation — you still need a separate tool for consent PDFs
- No Spiel Store equivalent — can't save and voice-trigger reusable clinical explanations
- No dental-specific examination templates with auto-populating baselines
- Mobile app reliability issues reported by users — transcription failures, mid-session sign-outs, lost notes
- Pricing unclear — starts at $799/year but scales with features and team size; no simple single price
- Built by a tech company in Australia, not by a practising dentist
The key differences
General medical vs dental-only
Heidi covers 200+ healthcare specialties. That breadth means it's not optimised for any one of them. DigitalTCO does one thing: dental documentation. Every template, every feature, every AI model is tuned for dental terminology, dental workflows, and dental medico-legal requirements. When you dictate 'MOD composite, rubber dam, Tetric Evo, cured in two-mil increments,' DigitalTCO knows exactly what that means and structures it correctly — because it was built by someone who's done that procedure.
Notes vs the full documentation suite
Heidi generates clinical notes. DigitalTCO generates clinical notes AND referral letters, patient letters, reply letters (Letter Engine), templated correspondence (Molar Mail), freeform dictated letters (Cariespondence), professional consent form PDFs, and reusable voice-triggered content blocks (The Spiel Store). The letters alone save most dentists 30-45 minutes a day. With Heidi, you're still writing those separately.
Super Dentist Cheat Mode™ vs templates
Heidi uses customisable templates you select before each consultation. DigitalTCO's Cheat Mode works the other way around — you just talk, and it figures out what kind of note it should be. Walk in with an extraction that turns into a surgical procedure, and it handles the note structure automatically. No template selection, no pre-planning.
Pricing transparency
DigitalTCO is $120/month. Everything included. No tiers, no add-ons, no per-seat pricing, no enterprise quotes. Heidi starts at $799/year for individuals but pricing scales with features and team size — you often need a sales conversation to get your actual price.
Feature-by-feature comparison
Pricing
DigitalTCO
Everything included. No tiers. 28-day free trial.
- All features included
- Unlimited notes
- Letters, consent forms, Spiel Store
- 28-day free trial
- Cancel anytime
Heidi
Starting price. Scales with features and team size. Sales conversation often required.
- — Free tier with limited features
- — $799/year for individual Pro plan
- — Team and enterprise pricing requires a quote
- — Feature tiers — some capabilities locked behind higher plans
- — 14-day free trial on paid plans
One more thing that matters
DigitalTCO was built by Kevin, a practising dentist who received a formal GDC complaint — not because he did anything wrong clinically, but because his notes couldn't prove he did anything right. Seven words across multiple appointments: "Examined. Discussed options. Pt happy to proceed."
That experience led him to build the tool he wished he'd had. Every feature in DigitalTCO exists because a dentist needed it — not because an engineer thought it was clever. The complaint story, the clinical terminology, the way notes need to be structured for medico-legal defensibility — it's all baked in because the person who built it has been on the wrong end of inadequate documentation.
Heidi was built by a technology company. DigitalTCO was built by a dentist who learned the hard way.
Try both. Decide for yourself.
Start your DigitalTCO free trial, use it alongside whatever else you're evaluating, and see which one your notes look better in.
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