palmER vs Heidi.

Unlike tools that require a hospital-wide rollout, Heidi and palmER are both available directly to individual clinicians.

Heidi is an ambient scribe used across different specialties and clinical settings.

palmER was built specifically for emergency medicine and urgent care by emergency physicians. It is designed to help throughout the shift, not just during the patient conversation.

At a glance

A scribe for the encounter or a tool for the shift?

Heidi starts with the patient conversation and turns it into structured documentation. That approach is designed to work across many types of clinical encounters.

Emergency medicine adds another problem: you are rarely working on one encounter at a time. One patient is waiting for imaging, another needs reassessment, a consultant is calling about a third, and another chart still needs to be finished.

palmER was built for that workflow. Ambient Scribe automatically drafts the HPI and Physical Exam, while palmER helps you keep up with multiple active workups throughout the shift.

More templates don't make an ED workflow

Heidi lets clinicians customize note structure through templates, including templates shared by its community. palmER also lets you customize the structure, style, and detail of your documentation through Documentation Preferences.

The difference is what happens beyond the note format. A template changes how documentation is organized. It does not create an emergency medicine workflow or account for everything that happens as the workup progresses.

palmER was built for that workflow, from the initial encounter through the completed workup and final MDM.

What happens when the workup comes back?

The initial patient conversation happens before much of the information needed for the final ED chart exists. Labs result, imaging is read, treatment takes effect, the patient is reassessed, consultants weigh in, and the disposition takes shape.

When the workup is complete, palmER uses the full encounter to build the MDM, including the history, exam, results, reassessments, consultations, treatment, and disposition.

Heidi's public product materials do not describe a dedicated workflow for building the MDM after the workup is complete.

palmER also reviews charts for missing documentation, helps with consultant communication, generates the documents your patients need for discharge, and includes the palmEM emergency medicine reference.

Privacy and data retention

Heidi's safety and HIPAA pages state that customer data is not used to train its AI and describe its security and compliance practices.

palmER does not store encounter audio. Patient data automatically deletes within 24 hours, and nothing you enter is used to train AI models.

With any clinical AI tool, find out what happens to the audio, transcript, generated notes, prompts, questions, and anything else you enter. What is stored? For how long? What remains outside the chart?

We cover those questions in more detail in What Does Your AI Scribe Save?.

Which one fits?

If you want a general-purpose ambient scribe that works across different specialties and clinical settings, Heidi is one option available directly.

If you work in emergency medicine or urgent care and want a private and secure platform built for the way your entire shift actually works, palmER was built for that.

Try palmER free for 30 days. No credit card required.

Or see the full palmER vs. Heidi comparison.