Cleo Health vs QiiQ Scribe (2026)
Two scribes built for acute care, which is the hardest acoustic and narrative environment in medicine, and they scope it differently. Cleo covers emergency and inpatient medicine across a reported four hundred facilities and has expanded into charge capture and documentation integrity, which makes it a platform purchase for an acute service line. QiiQ is emergency department only and engineered for it, filtering departmental noise and handling the non linear encounter where a patient's story arrives out of order, with the review gate built into the workflow and a free first month to test it. For a health system, Cleo covers more. For a single emergency department that wants a product designed for its acoustics and its narrative shape, QiiQ is the tighter fit and the cheaper experiment.
- It covers the whole acute setting rather than one department, spanning emergency and inpatient medicine across a reported four hundred or more facilities.
- It expanded outward from the note into charge capture and documentation integrity, so an acute service gets more than documentation from one contract.
- The engineering problem is described with genuine precision, naming layered context, re evaluations and care team dynamics rather than gesturing at complexity.
- It is built for the emergency department specifically rather than adapted to it, filtering departmental background noise with prompts tuned to non linear encounters.
- The review gate is built into the workflow rather than described in prose, with notes carrying explicit in progress status before anything is finalized.
- A first month free with no credit card is offered plainly, so a department can test it without a procurement cycle.
This comparison is published by AI Health Index, an independent research platform that compares healthcare AI vendors objectively. Cleo Health and QiiQ Scribe are each graded against the same capability taxonomy, from each vendor's own public materials and the regulatory record, under the AI Health Index verification standard. No vendor pays for placement, and no vendor has reviewed this page. How this evidence is graded
Plain facts
| Fact | Cleo Health | QiiQ Scribe |
|---|---|---|
| Primary category | Ambient Scribes | Ambient Scribes |
| Headquarters | New York, New York, United States | Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada |
| Website | cleohealth.io | qiiq.health |
Side by Side
Select any grade to read the note behind it.
Each vendor in one paragraph
Written to be quoted whole. Each paragraph opens the AI Health Index profile of the vendor: what the product is, who buys it and what it does.
Cleo Health was founded by clinical AI researchers from Yale and works exclusively in acute care, emergency departments and inpatient medicine, across a reported 400 or more facilities. It began as an ambient scribe and expanded as customers asked for more, debuting its Acute Care OS at HIMSS in March 2026 to unify ambient documentation, charge capture, real time clinical documentation improvement and automated patient assignments in one workflow.
Source: AI Health Index, August 2026
QiiQ Healthcare, pronounced quick, is a Vancouver company whose scribe is built specifically for the emergency department rather than adapted to it. That focus shows in the engineering: it filters emergency department background noise, and its prompts are tuned for the non linear workflows and clinical anomalies of emergency care, where a physician moves between several patients, is interrupted repeatedly and returns to encounters out of order.
Source: AI Health Index, August 2026
Questions buyers ask
How do Cleo Health and QiiQ Scribe work with the EHR?
For Cleo Health, the vendor states that it connects directly to a hospital's admission, discharge and transfer feed using standard interface protocols, and that no custom build or heavy technology involvement is required.
With QiiQ Scribe, the pitch that a clinician can push notes into the record without bothering the IT department is appealing for a physician group with no informatics support, and it is also the description of a workflow that bypasses the usual integration governance. From the AI Health Index, drawn from each vendor's own published materials and the regulatory record, verified August 4, 2026. No vendor pays for placement.
How are Cleo Health and QiiQ Scribe priced and sold?
In Cleo Health's case, enterprise sold to health systems and provider groups through demo and partnership.
For QiiQ Scribe, a first month free with no credit card required is advertised, and team discounts are promoted without figures. From the AI Health Index, drawn from each vendor's own published materials and the regulatory record, verified August 4, 2026. No vendor pays for placement.
How do Cleo Health and QiiQ Scribe handle patient data?
With Cleo Health, the vendor states it will serve over seven million patients across more than four hundred hospitals, and that its customers represent a substantial share of United States emergency medicine and hospital medicine clinicians. A retention or training position that is immaterial at pilot scale is a national dataset at this one.
In QiiQ Scribe's case, the assertion also suggests the compliance material may not have been written for the market being served. From the AI Health Index, drawn from each vendor's own published materials and the regulatory record, verified August 4, 2026. No vendor pays for placement.
Related comparisons
Other published head to head assessments involving these vendors or their closest peers. The full set for this category is on the Ambient Scribes page.
Neither vendor publishes a security attestation, a health privacy statement or business associate terms, which is a wide gap in acute care where documentation is produced under time pressure and reviewed less carefully. Cleo runs several surfaces that act during care rather than after it, including real time documentation integrity prompting, and none is bounded in public, which puts it on the coding gradient with the highest consequence version of that exposure. QiiQ publishes no study, benchmark, named customer or deployment figure at all, and its default workflow is transfer rather than integration.