Best Practice Software tells practices they are breaching licence by using Heidi II

NEWS  - eHealthNews editor Rebecca McBeth

Best Practice Software has told customers that using Heidi’s new AI agent tool, Heidi II, with their practice management software breaches their End User Licence Agreement (EULA), prompting a dispute between the two companies over clinician choice, patient safety, and software interoperability. 

Best Practice chief executive Craig Hodges says they are updating their EULA to make clear that the use of bots, scraping tools, and robotic process automation are also not permitted with its software. 

In response, Heidi says it stands for interoperability, that this position restricts clinician choice and “holds back innovation that gives clinicians more time with patients”. 

Hodges has written to users of BP Premier warning that under the terms of the EULA, they are prohibited from allowing any third party to access, use, or modify the software or database without Best Practice's prior written consent, and that this consent that has not been granted for Heidi II. 

Best Practice holds the majority of Australia's GP software market and a proportion of the New Zealand market and says its concerns are specifically about Heidi II, not Heidi's existing scribe or virtual assistant products. 

Hodges writes that Heidi II operates differently from a traditional digital scribe, describing it as an AI agent tool that can work under a clinician's login and navigate Bp Premier autonomously, without prompting or supervision. 

"Heidi II has the capability to change or delete information such as patient history, test results, and appointments without clinician oversight," Hodges says.  

"Clinicians may then rely on altered, incomplete, or false records, or may rely on the agent's judgement of what is clinically relevant." 

Best Practice also says that Heidi II can access patient data in Bp Premier as well as other platforms where sensitive patient information may be stored and that using it without patient consent risks breaching the Privacy Act. 

Chief executive and founder of Heidi Health Tom Kelly says the issue is one of access and professional autonomy.  

"Should a GP need a software vendor's permission to access their own clinical records, on their own computer and servers in their own practice?" he asks. 

The company says Heidi II agents work under clinician supervision, return their work for review, and require approval for clinical decisions and outbound communications and that Heidi does not sell patient data or use patient data to train AI models. 

"Privacy, safety and clinician oversight are essential," Kelly says.  

"Heidi II is built within the same data privacy, security and compliance framework as our scribe, where we operate in some of the most regulated markets in the world." 

Simon Kos, Heidi’s global chief medical officer, says that “a vendor that uses its licence terms to dictate which tools you can use is putting its commercial position ahead of your professional judgement." 

Heidi says it has sought deeper integration with Best Practice for three years and is ready to work together.  

Karl Cole, GP at Papatoetoe Family Doctors, says there is huge potential to increase efficiency with AI-powered tools and bots and the lack of regulation in this area is a real concern. 

He says he can see a PMS vendor’s concern about access to its system, but it should not be their role to regulate the use of third-party tools, especially if they are using patient safety and security concerns as justification for blocking integrations. 

New Zealand currently has no framework governing AI or software as a medical device, which Cole says can leave vendors to see themselves as the "last man standing as the carertakers of data”. 

He argues that it should be the role of government to regulate AI-powered tools in healthcare, in the same way that it independently regulates the pharmaceutical industry. This means doctors can rely on the safety and efficacy of the drugs they prescribe, but they do not have the same ability when it comes to digital tools. 

Cole adds that PMS vendors’ reluctance to provide API access to third-party developers can force clinicians to rely on workarounds such as screen-scraping robots to automate tasks across clinical systems.

If you would like to provide feedback on this news story, please contact the editor Rebecca McBeth.

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