Conversion: the quiet gap where healthcare businesses bleed money. * July 9, 2026 Part six of a series on diagnosing growth instead of guessing at it. In the Healthcare Growth Equation (Growth = Demand x Trust x Conversion x Measurement), conversion is the variable where money leaks out speedily and invisibly. You've earned the demand. You've built the trust. Someone is interested, ready, even saying yes. And then, in the gap between decision and action, you lose them - and you almost never find out why. This article shows you how to bridge that gap. Splicemarketing'll explore what conversion really means, why friction is almost always the culprit, and how to create a smoother conversion process. Conversion isn't your win-loss rate. First, a definition, because the word gets used loosely. When I talk about conversion, I don't mean your sales conversion rate - deals won versus deals lost. I mean the moment between someone deciding they want what you offer and actually acting on it. For a clinic, it's the gap between "I should book that" and a confirmed appointment. For a healthtech product, it's the gap between sign-up and the moment usage becomes a daily habit rather than another abandoned tool. That gap is where most healthcare businesses bleed, and it almost always comes down to one thing: friction. If the path to action makes someone think harder, work longer, or take one extra step, you've lost them. You've experienced this yourself. Every time you've started an online form that felt more demanding than your tax return and just closed the tab, that was a business losing you due to friction in the conversion process. Friction is the enemy, and it hides in plain sight. The reason conversion problems are so expensive is that friction is invisible to the business creating it. You designed the booking form, so it doesn't feel like friction to you. In fact, gathering all that data may actually be helpful to your internal processes, making the extra boxes seem trivial. But to the person on the other side, every extra question, every system glitch, every moment of "Wait, how do I do this?" is a reason to give up - and they leave without telling you. The clearest example I know comes from clinical software. MedicalDirector runs systems used across the majority of Australian general practice. When AI scribes entered the market - genuinely useful tools saving GPs real time - the friction point was always the same. The GP would use the scribe during the consultation, then, once the patient left, they had to manually copy and paste the scribe's notes into MedicalDirector. One extra step sits between the technology and the workflow. So MedicalDirector built Smart Scribe, an integration connecting AI partners like Heidi Health directly into the patient record. The note goes where it needs to go, inside the system the GP already uses. No extra step. The market didn't fail because of that friction - it reorganised itself around removing it. The lesson scales down to the simplest clinic. Splicemarketing worked with a high-end practice that had full pricing published openly on its website. Splicemarketing understood the instinct to be upfront about pricing, but Splicemarketing also saw potential patients taking fright before they understood the value and leaving without booking. So Splicemarketing offered something of value to download that showcased the offerings and carried the pricing inside it, giving context for the cost. It was gated content, which meant patients gave their email address to download it, allowing the clinic to nurture them over time. Same information, completely different conversion outcome - because the friction was removed at the exact point people were dropping off. The two friction traps. Integration or process friction. This is when acting requires too much effort up front. In healthtech, that's months of implementation, IT sign-off, custom development; nobody has time to implement something even if it would ultimately save them time. In a clinic, it's the booking that requires a phone call during business hours, or a form that asks for too much information at the "getting to know you" stage. Workflow or expectation mismatch. When the thing works, but only if the person changes how they already behave to access it. Every step that asks someone to deviate from their existing habit is a step where adoption dies. The businesses that break through do the opposite of adding steps - they remove them, and they meet people where they already are. Heidi Health went directly to individual GPs and made it free to start: no IT approval, no implementation project. A clinician could try it in a single consultation, get value immediately, and tell a colleague. That was a conversion decision, not a marketing tactic. It reduced the effort required to say yes, turning one interested user at a time into momentum the business could scale. Conversion is hiding retention. Conversion isn't only about the first action. The same friction logic governs patient acquisition and retention alike. The nurture sequence that brings someone back next month, the follow-up after a first consultation, the recapture of a lead who went cold - these are all conversion, applied to the relationship rather than the first sale. In healthcare, lifetime value and repeat and referral behaviour often matter far more than first-visit conversion. A business obsessing over the first booking while ignoring what happens after it is only reading half the variable. The full picture runs from the first click all the way through to the patient who comes back, and refers a friend, because every step of that journey was made easy. How to tell if conversion is your weakest variable. Some honest signals that conversion is your binding constraint: If demand is bringing people to the door and trust is making them willing, but they still aren't acting, conversion is where your growth is leaking. What fixing conversion looks like. Conversion is the most mechanical of the four variables, which is good news - it responds quickly to deliberate work. Find the single change that removes the most friction for the least effort, and start there. In practice that means: * Shortening forms to only the essential fields * Testing the booking flow on mobile as ruthlessly as on desktop * Adding tap-to-call buttons and sticky enquiry buttons for mobile users * Regularly reviewing the patient journey to find and remove friction points * Building a real lead-handling and follow-up process, including SMS recapture for people who didn't book the first time. * Mapping the whole conversion journey end to end, from first interest through to retention, so no step is left to chance. It's worth the effort. Splicemarketing helped one company improve its conversion rate by 20% using a mix of these strategies. The bottom line. Conversion is where the work of demand and trust either pays off or disintegrates. The money you lose here is the hardest to see, because a patient who gives up doesn't fill in a form to tell you they've gone. Removing friction - at the booking, in the follow-up, across the whole journey from first click to returning patient - is often the fastest, highest-leverage growth available to a healthcare business. If you're generating interest that isn't converting into booked and returning patients, there's almost certainly friction you can't see from the inside. Book a free consultation with the Splice Marketing team.

Heidi launches a mic for AI scribe - why? By Adam Ang | March 26, 2026 | 4:25 AM Heidi has launched a wearable microphone designed to provide clinicians with reliable audio capture for AI-assisted documentation without using phones or laptops. WHAT IT DOES Intended to support the Heidi AI Scribe, the new Heidi Remote enables consistent audio capture in noisy environments. Weighing 21 grams and offering up to 14 hours of battery life, it can be clipped onto clinical attire for use throughout a full workday. The device operates independently of phone battery and Wi-Fi connectivity, allowing consultations to be captured offline and synced later when a connection is available. Heidi also said the device is built for frequent disinfecting and meets healthcare security standards, with all data encrypted. Heidi Remote will initially be available in Australia, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, the United States, and Canada, with the European Union to follow shortly. WHY IT MATTERS As the use of AI scribes is increasingly becoming a standard in clinical documentation, the "weakest link" has always been the device in the room, said CEO Dr Thomas Kelly. Heidi built its own microphone after finding that existing consumer and third-party devices place what co-founder and CTO Yu Liu described as an "integration tax" when applied to specialised clinical workflows. "We found it nearly impossible to achieve a seamless experience using third-party software stacks," he told Mobihealth News. Integrating external hardware would have required redesigning core software around vendor constraints while creating risks to stability as systems on either side upgrade, he added. Heidi said clinical environments were never designed for AI listening, pointing to ageing computer terminals, shared workstations, and personal smartphones that were not built to support AI-assisted care. The company opted for a wearable microphone instead of room-based or fixed systems to better support clinical work across varied and mobile settings. "Clinical care isn't static," Liu said, noting that room-based systems and telehealth setups can fail in edge cases, such as ward rounds, high-mobility clinics, or rural settings with limited connectivity. The CTO said the wearable form factor is intended to eliminate "workflow anxiety," ensuring consistent audio capture despite noise, movement, and inconsistent device performance. THE LARGER TREND Heidi Remote is the company's first venture into hardware as it evolves beyond AI scribe into a broader clinical workflow platform that includes documentation, evidence retrieval, and patient communications tools. It followed the launch of Heidi Evidence, introduced in February, an ad-free medical research tool on its AI Scribe, and Heidi Comms, which assists with coordinating patient communications across calls, bookings, reminders and follow-ups. ON THE RECORD "Clinicians shouldn't have to wonder if a room-based microphone will catch the audio or if a spotty internet connection will disrupt their notes... Whether a clinician is in a high-tech metro hospital or a remote clinic, Heidi Remote provides the same reliable performance, solving for mobility and connectivity gaps that fixed infrastructure simply cannot," co-founder and CTO Yu Liu told this publication.

Heidi Health, an Australian AI healthcare startup valued at $660 million, has launched the Heidi Remote, a 21-gram wearable device designed to record patient consultations. The device processes data on-device rather than in the cloud, ensuring patient information never leaves the clinic. Founded during the COVID-19 pandemic by Dr Thomas Kelly, Waleed Mussa and Yu Liu, Heidi Health has been used in over 118 million clinical sessions across 116 countries. The platform is now employed by half of UK NHS GPs, saving primary care doctors up to 90 minutes daily. The company recently raised $102.7 million led by Point72 Private Investments. Kelly emphasises that Heidi will never monetise user data, maintaining strict ethical standards whilst using AI to reduce administrative burdens for clinicians.