Many clinicians and patients are skeptical about the use of AI in medicine. Yet, according to some research, 75-80% of clinicians use AI to support them in operating at the top of their license. As a result, they enjoy being a doctor again, a feeling that was absent in medicine for some time.
Their patients feel the positive effects, too. Many feel that clinicians actually hear them and make them part of the decision-making process. In that sense, technology is humanizing medicine.
So how can we deploy technology in such a way that it supports both clinicians and patients, while putting humans back in control? That is what Dr. Hannah Allen and I discuss in episode 166.
Dr. Hannah Allen is the Chief Medical Officer at Heidi, a technology company that is building an AI Care Partner that helps clinicians focus on patients again by automating the administrative work.
Here are some of the highlights:
- How the administrative burden in medicine contributes to 42% of UK doctors thinking about leaving medicine in the next 5 years
- What health data from pregnant women can show us about their health later in life, and how it can predict conditions.
- Why software vendors, like Heidi, should do everything they can to educate clinicians about the upside, but also the risks of using AI.
Plus, you’ll hear the story of a pediatrician who used Heidi’s AI to write a patient explainer for a seven-year-old “in the style of Taylor Swift”.
While this episode is relatively short, it is filled with anecdotes of building a tech company in a regulated industry, a debate around the role of AI in medicine, and, towards the end, a full set of takeaways for founders who are fundraising.
Start listening by pressing play below.
Using Technology To Bring the Human Side Back To Medicine with Dr. Hannah Allen | Ep. 166 – Women Disrupting Tech
Or keep reading for practical takeaways, highlights, and trends from the episode.
Practical Takeaways for Founders
Heidi is not Dr. Hannah Allen’s first healthtech company. She previously worked at Babylon, a telemedicine company, where she headed up the team that launched the UK’s first digital-first primary care service. After that, she founded her own women’s health startup in the pregnancy and postnatal space. That means she has lots of learnings that founders can benefit from. Here are three:
Counter the bias with data.
Hannah experienced first-hand the stark and persistent biases in venture capital. Even female VCs typically ask female founders questions about risk and safety. Male founders more often get questions about growth and opportunity instead. Founders can counter this gap by remaining highly data-driven throughout the process.
Don’t raise just for the sake of raising.
She advises that founders shouldn’t be raising capital for the sake of it. According to her, it is often far better to achieve product-market fit in a non-VC environment first, and then raise capital with highly specific, strategic operational goals.
Look for VCs who have run companies themselves.
Founders should also look for investors with experience running a company themselves. These “operator VCs” understand the struggles of building firsthand, and they can connect founders with a network of peers going through the same experience.
These lessons clearly come from a woman who has experienced the healthtech ecosystem. And while they apply to all founders, they particularly benefit female founders.
So when you know a female founder in healthtech who could benefit from these lessons, use the share buttons below to share the episode with them.
Or scroll down for magic moments.
Highlights and timestamps
| Time | Highlight |
|---|---|
| 00:00 | Introduction |
| 04:35 | Introduction to Dr. Hannah Allen |
| 07:32 | Transitioning from Medicine to Tech |
| 10:31 | The Role of Technology in Healthcare |
| 13:43 | Global Healthcare Challenges |
| 17:15 | Predicting Women’s Health Issues |
| 21:20 | AI in Healthcare: Opportunities and Concerns |
| 25:18 | Heidi: Revolutionizing Clinical Workflows |
| 27:14 | The Rise of Heidi: Word of Mouth Success |
| 28:50 | Measuring Impact: Time Savings and Burnout Reduction |
| 30:01 | Expanding Horizons: Beyond Documentation |
| 32:03 | The Role of AI in Clinical Practice |
| 35:18 | Transforming Patient Interactions with AI |
| 39:01 | Patient Feedback and Trust in AI |
| 43:50 | The Human Element in Healthcare |
| 45:04 | Future Vision: A Seamless Healthcare Experience |
| 47:18 | Advice for Founders: Building for Real Problems |
| 50:44 | Closing Thoughts and Resources |
The Episode In an Infographic
3 Magic Moments In The Episode
Dr. Hannah Allen was jaded from a bruising VC fundraising experience when a friend told her to try Heidi. She calls what happened next ‘seeing magic’. Here are three more moments when magic shows up in the episode.
Her wow moment at a tennis match.
Dr. Allen knows from experience that clinicians are historically hard-to-impress. So overhearing two local doctors recommending Heidi to each other while she was watching her daughter’s tennis match was a magic moment. The word-of-mouth validation among clinicians showed her how rapidly the tool’s impact was scaling.
The pediatrician’s Taylor Swift explainer.
How do you explain a medical condition to a seven-year-old? One pediatrician decided to ask Heidi to generate a Taylor Swift-style patient explainer. It’s a wonderful example of how AI can be used to help explain difficult problems in language people can understand. Oh, and the girl loved it.
Making the patient part of the medical decision process
Information from patients is critical in deciding the right diagnosis and treatment. Hannah gives the example of a respiratory doctor who shows his patients the AI-generated note and asks, “Is anything missing?” So patients can add or correct details on the spot. This moment shows how AI can be used to make patients part of the decision-making process around their health.
These moments matter because, at a time when many of us are wary of AI’s mistakes and skeptical of its place in medicine, they show the tool making things better in small, specific ways: a scaling business, a comforted child, a more equal conversation.
🗣 What was your magic moment from the episode? Was it the comment at her daughter’s tennis match, the patient explainer in Taylor Swift style, or the patient being included in the decision process? Drop your magic moment below or slide into the DMs on LinkedIn or Instagram!
Or scroll down for my favorite quote from the episode.
The Quote from the Episode
"Let's use technology to allow medicine to become more human again and allow us to focus on that really nice human side of healthcare."
— Dr. Hannah Allen, Chief Medical Officer at Heidi
Dr. Allen has seen what the stress and administrative burden can do to doctors and nurses and the quality of their decisions. AI can free doctors from turning their backs to type on a keyboard. Instead, they can look the patient in the eye, offer non-verbal empathy, and explain their clinical thoughts out loud.
Research from external evaluations shows that over 90% of patients surveyed felt more listened to when their doctor used the AI scribe.
Know a founder who is skeptical about using AI in medicine? Use the buttons to share it with them.
3 Trends I’m Seeing Across Conversations
There are many overlapping threads to be found in this episode. One of the reasons for that is what Heidi does: use AI in the context of medicine. The other, of course, is that women’s health and health in general are topics that have been featured regularly on this podcast. So here are three topics from this episode that have appeared in previous episodes as well.
The women’s health data gap
If you’ve listened regularly, you’ll know that capturing and understanding women’s hormonal data is the master key to unlocking a lot of cures, treatments and solutions to women’s health conditions. Dr. Allen mentions that real-time hormone tracking products represent the next frontier in personalized wellness. We’ve talked about this topic in many recent episodes, starting with episode 140 with Ida Tin.
The role of AI in reducing the admin for clinicians
It is clear that it can help clinicians in taking care of the administrative burden. Heidi is a great example of that. We saw another example in episode 56 where Jacqueline Kazmaier shared how her company, Autoscriber, is supporting medical specialists with their clinical note-taking. And in episode 112, Raju Joshi talks about how her company, Cogensus, uses AI to surface early signals of cognitive decline, information that gives clinicians something to act on sooner.
The ‘Left Shift” to preventative health
At the start of the episode, Dr. Allen talks about pregnancy as a predictor of women’s later health. It fits the broader trend she sees: the “left shift” away overall from reactive, episodic medicine to continuous, proactive, and preventative care. From Dr Robin Blackstone, we heard in episode 163 that this shift is needed for healthcare to move to a state where it keeps people healthy.
🗣️ How do you feel about the role of AI in medicine? Can it support the trend towards more preventative health? Or do we need more or better data? I’d love to hear from you in the comments.
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Coming Up On Women Disrupting Tech
Only 3% of people who show up to an event went looking for it. The other 97% came because someone they trust was already going. In episode 167, Elise Mol, founder of BASH, breaks down what that means for how event organizers should be selling tickets, and why an industry many assume is booming post-COVID is actually under more pressure than ever.
In this clip, Elise walks through what happens when an event sells a meaningful share of its tickets right when they go live. The early buyers become advocates in the lead-up, pulling friends in because, as she puts it, we're social creatures who want to be where the people we like are going. Two hundred early buyers today means two hundred people spending the next twelve weeks doing your marketing for you.
Curious how BASH builds exclusivity into ticket access to make that pull even stronger? Leave your email address below to find new episodes in your inbox every Thursday.
What I Want to Leave You With
If this episode shows one thing, it's this: the role of AI in healthcare is not just about saving GPs an hour a day in admin. It's about enabling medical professionals (doctors, surgeons, specialists, nurses) to perform at the top of their license.
When we remove the cognitive overwhelm of paperwork and the "Swiss cheese" hazard of documentation errors, we give doctors their headspace back. With that, we improve decision-making and bring back the "fun" in practicing medicine.
There is also another lesson from the Heidi story: AI should not replace humans. Instead, it's about making sure it operates alongside humans as a support. In that way, AI is about allowing medicine to become human again.
PS. During the episode, Dr Allen also mentions a company pioneering real-time hormone monitoring (she refers to it as the ZOE for hormone monitoring). The UK company that is doing that is Level Zero Health. You can take a look at their website here.
Listen to the full conversation with Sophie Haccou on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or YouTube. And if you are a female founder navigating a funding conversation, take a look at FundingCoach.ai.
About Dr. Hannah Allen
Dr. Hannah Allen is the Chief Medical Officer at Heidi. She focuses on how technology can reduce cognitive load for clinicians and improve the experience of care, without losing the human side of medicine.
She is a practicing GP who has spent the last decade working in health technology. She practiced for 14 years across rural, inner-city, and hospital settings in the UK before moving into tech at Babylon Health, where she built out the women's health vertical and later headed the team that launched the UK's first digital-first primary care service. She went on to found her own women's health startup in the pregnancy and postnatal space, building a longitudinal data pipeline to help predict disease risk earlier in a woman's life.
You can connect with her on LinkedIn.
About Heidi
Heidi is building an AI Care Partner to expand clinical capacity by automating administrative work (documentation, form filling, and task management) so clinicians can focus on patients. Used across emergency departments, general practice, and specialist clinics, Heidi supports more than 2 million consults each week in 110 languages from 116 countries.
Founded in Melbourne, Australia, Heidi has raised $96.6M USD from global investors including Point72 Private Investments, Blackbird, Headline, Phoenix Court's growth fund - Latitude, Possible Ventures, and Archangel. Heidi adheres to international standards including the NHS, HIPAA, GDPR, and Australian Privacy Principles, and has obtained enterprise-grade security certifications such as SOC2 and ISO27001.
You can learn more on the website or follow Heidi on LinkedIn, Instagram, and YouTube.
Listen to Episode 166 on Spotify, Apple or YouTube
Featured Event: TEDx Coolhaven Women
The TEDx Coolhaven Women event takes place on 9 October from 6:30 to 11:30 in the evening at HAL4 aan de Maas in Rotterdam. This year’s theme is The New Builders, a theme that seamlessly aligns with the content on this podcast.
Throughout the evening, you’ll hear powerful TEDx talks from women who are redesigning the systems that shape our lives—from leadership and parenting to women’s health, mental healthcare, and access to investment capital. Together, they’ll explore what it really takes to build a better future.
As a proud media sponsor, I am happy to offer you a chance to be there in person, to listen to groundbreaking talks and meet and network with like-minded people. As a listener to the podcast, you’ll get a 25% discount when you use the code WDT25 at checkout. And even though this is a TEDx Women event, men are very welcome to join.
- 🗓️ 9 October 2026, from 18:30 - 23:30
- 📍 HAL4 aan de Maas in Rotterdam
- 🎟️ You can buy your ticket here.
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