NissiHealth vs Heidi Health
Heidi is a capable scribe that writes the note and hands it to your practice system. NissiHealth is a scribe built inside a South African clinical record, so the script, the sick note, the codes and the safety check come out of the same recording. Both leave the signature to you. The right choice depends on which job you are hiring for.
- You already have a practice system you like and only want the note written for you.
- Price per clinician is the deciding factor, or you want a free tier to start on.
- You need a native mobile app that captures offline.
- You want the prescription, sick note and referral produced at sign-off, in the South African legal format, with verification.
- You want diagnoses, vitals and medications to land as structured record fields, not paragraphs.
- You want a system that refuses to sign an unsafe note, and records the override if you proceed anyway.
- You want recordings and documents stored in South Africa, and one system from booking to signed record.
Fifteen things a practice actually asks about
Every Heidi statement below is taken from a public Heidi page, numbered to the source list at the foot of this page and checked on 22 September 2026. Where a page is silent, the cell says so rather than guessing.
| Topic | Heidi Health | NissiHealth |
|---|---|---|
| What it is | An AI scribe. Ambient session or dictation; the finished note is pushed into your existing practice system as text.3,10 | An AI scribe inside a full South African clinical record: the note, the documents, the coding, plus booking, reception, patient portal and telehealth. |
| Price in South Africa | Free tier with unlimited transcription and standard templates. Clinician R750 per user per month. Practice R1,050 per user per month, billed annually.1 | R2,499 per month including one clinician seat and every feature. Extra seats R1,099 per month. 14-day free trial, no card up front. |
| Prescriptions | Not stated on Heidi’s public feature pages.3 | A Regulation 33 prescription is generated at sign-off with a unique script number and a QR code a pharmacy can scan to verify it. Wet-ink signature still required. |
| Sick notes and referrals | Medical certificates, referral letters and discharge summaries from templates.3 | Sick notes and referral letters in the HPCSA format, each with a public verification page for the employer or receiving practice. |
| ICD-10 coding | Code sets listed for the United States, Canada, Australia and the United Kingdom. No South African set is listed. Coding is on paid plans only.5,1 | South African Master Industry Table ICD-10 with Prescribed Minimum Benefit conditions flagged inline. Included on every plan. |
| What reaches the record | The completed note as text; confirmed codes are embedded in the note. Integrations push notes into the patient file.3,5,10 | Diagnoses, vitals, medications and allergies are written as structured fields you confirm one by one, with who-said-what provenance kept. |
| Before a note is signed | The clinician reviews and edits the draft. No medication or allergy check before signing is stated.6,2 | The server refuses to sign an encounter with an unresolved critical allergy–medication conflict or a note not grounded in the transcript. Overrides need a written reason on the audit record. |
| Where data lives | “South African customer data is hosted securely on servers in the European Union.”2 | Recordings, generated documents and encryption keys in Cape Town. The clinical database in Frankfurt under POPIA section 72 terms. Stated in full in our Privacy Policy. |
| Audio retention | “As soon as Heidi transcribes, the audio disappears.” No audio is kept.6,7 | Encrypted audio is kept for 90 days so a transcript can be re-checked or re-run, then purged. The period is configurable per practice. |
| Languages | 79 transcription languages listed. Afrikaans is the South African language on the list.4 | English, plus the other ten official South African languages in beta, labelled as such in the product. Every note is drafted in English. |
| Practice-system integrations | Practice Perfect and HealthFocus integrations announced at the South African launch.9,10,11 | No practice-system integrations yet. A FHIR R4 partner API for approved integrations; copy-paste output into Healthbridge, GoodX or any other system. |
| Mobile | iOS and Android apps. Sessions can be captured offline and generate when back online.8 | Runs in the browser on any phone or tablet, no install. Needs a connection; audio uploads in small resumable chunks if it drops. |
| Beyond the scribe | Task management, Ask Heidi, a template community.1,3 | Online booking, reception check-in, patient portal, telehealth video with in-call scribe, tamper-evident audit log, POPIA export and erasure workflows. |
| Independent certification | ISO 27001 certified; SOC 2 audited.2 | No third-party certification yet. Every control is documented and can be shown live in a demo; an independent penetration test is planned before the first practice goes live. |
| Track record | Launched in South Africa in April 2026; the launch release reports more than 15,000 clinicians using it.9 | Pre-launch. We are onboarding a small group of founding practices and will publish nothing we cannot show. |
Heidi Health is a trademark of its owner. NissiHealth is not affiliated with, endorsed by or sponsored by Heidi Health. Prices are as displayed on Heidi’s South African pricing page on 22 September 2026 and may change; check the source before deciding. If something here is out of date, write to nissihealth@wemakesites.co.za and we will correct it.
Price, reach and polish
Heidi is cheaper per clinician and has a free tier. It ships native mobile apps that capture offline. It already connects to Practice Perfect and HealthFocus, it holds ISO 27001 and SOC 2, and its launch release reports a user base in South Africa that we do not have. If those are the things that matter most to your practice, that is a fair reason to choose it.
The documents, the record and the gate
A note is the start of the paperwork, not the end of it. NissiHealth produces the Regulation 33 script, the sick note and the referral at sign-off, codes against the South African ICD-10 table with PMB flags, and writes what it heard into structured record fields you confirm. It will not sign an encounter with an unresolved critical allergy conflict, and it keeps recordings and documents in South Africa.
It is also the whole practice system, from online booking and reception to the patient portal, so a solo GP can open with one login instead of four.
The questions this comparison raises
Where is my data stored?
Audio recordings, generated documents and encryption keys are stored in a Cape Town, South Africa data centre. Your practice’s clinical database (records, transcripts, notes) is hosted in the European Union (Frankfurt) under a binding agreement that meets POPIA’s section 72 standard, encrypted at rest and in transit. During a consultation, audio goes to our speech-to-text processors in the EU and de-identified text to our AI note-drafting processor in the United States, both under data-processing terms. The full list of providers and locations is in our Privacy Policy.
Are prescriptions fully digital?
Prescriptions are printable and QR-verifiable. Each script is generated at sign-off with a unique script number and a QR code that any pharmacy can scan to confirm it is genuine — cancelling a script invalidates that check immediately, and reissuing starts a fresh 30-day presentation window. A wet-ink signature is still required before a pharmacy can dispense, in line with South African prescription regulations.
Can the AI sign notes or issue prescriptions on its own?
No. Everything the AI drafts stays a draft until you review and approve it, section by section. The system will also refuse to sign an encounter that has an unresolved critical allergy–medication conflict, or a note that is not grounded in the transcript. A clinician can consciously override a block — but only with a written justification that is recorded in the audit log.
Does NissiHealth integrate with other systems?
NissiHealth generates printable, QR-verified prescriptions at sign-off — no third-party portal needed. Speech recognition runs on a medical-grade engine and note drafting on a leading clinical AI model. Copy-paste output works with Healthbridge, GoodX, or any existing system.
Be one of the founding practices
NissiHealth is new. We don’t have testimonials or case studies to show you yet — and we won’t invent them. What the first practices get instead:
Hands-on onboarding
We set up your practice with you and stay close through the first real consults, until the workflow fits the way you work.
A direct line to the builder
Questions and issues go straight to the person who writes the code — not a ticket queue.
A say in the roadmap
What founding practices ask for is what gets built next.
Public pages retrieved on 22 September 2026. Numbers match the superscripts in the table.
Bring one of your own consults
The fairest comparison is your consultation, recorded once. Book a demo and we will show you the note, the script and the codes that come out the other side.