Home topics news News News One database decision helped Heidi return 18 million hours to clinicians worldwide Yajush Gupta January 23, 2026 Australian startup Heidi just processed 81 million medical consultations globally after ditching their database setup. Here’s why infrastructure shift matters for healthcare AI. What’s happening : Melbourne-based AI healthcare startup Heidi has scaled its clinical documentation platform to process 81 million medical consultations in just 18 months. Why this matters: Healthcare professionals spend up to 40% of their working hours on documentation tasks rather than direct patient care. As demand for AI-driven healthcare solutions accelerates globally, the technical infrastructure underneath must keep pace. When Heidi’s engineering team hit a wall in late 2023, it wasn’t a product problem. The AI medical scribe worked. Clinicians loved it. But the database couldn’t keep up. Heidi had built its initial platform on Amazon DocumentDB. It handled early growth fine. Then the company scaled. Usage exploded. Meetings with health systems multiplied. Suddenly, the infrastructure that worked yesterday couldn’t support today’s demands. “We couldn’t scale without downtime, which was a critical issue: we operate in the world of healthcare where clinicians need seamless access to resources 24/7,” said Oscar Lukersmith, Head of Data at Heidi. “Our initial database set-up couldn’t accommodate the level of growth that our users needed, it didn’t support search and index building functionalities, which are key in AI use cases and we were experiencing increased latency.” The problem wasn’t just about numbers. It was about what healthcare needs. A