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, which is the broadest acute coverage in this index.
- 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 finalised.
- 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
Each record in one paragraph
Written to be quoted whole. Each paragraph states what the AI Health Index verified about the vendor, with the caveats attached. Generated from this pair’s live capability grades, so it moves when a grade moves.
The AI Health Index awards Cleo Health its top capability grade on AI Centrality. Set against QiiQ Scribe, Cleo Health grades higher on HIPAA and BAA Posture and Security Certifications and Trust Center. Its thinnest published disclosure sits on Model Supply Chain Disclosure and AI Liability and Recourse. Grades reflect evidence the AI Health Index could verify at the last review, so a low grade records disclosure the vendor has not published rather than a capability it has been shown to lack.
Source: AI Health Index, August 2026
The AI Health Index awards QiiQ Scribe its top capability grade on AI Centrality. Set against Cleo Health, QiiQ Scribe grades higher on Autonomy and Oversight Model and AI Liability and Recourse. Its thinnest published disclosure sits on Model Supply Chain Disclosure. Grades reflect evidence the AI Health Index could verify at the last review, so a low grade records disclosure the vendor has not published rather than a capability it has been shown to lack.
Source: AI Health Index, August 2026
Questions buyers ask
Should we choose Cleo Health or QiiQ Scribe?
On the axes where the AI Health Index separates them, Cleo Health grades higher on HIPAA and BAA Posture and Security Certifications and Trust Center, and QiiQ Scribe grades higher on Autonomy and Oversight Model and AI Liability and Recourse. Neither leads on the greater share of scored axes, so the decision turns on which constraint is binding rather than on an overall winner.
Where do Cleo Health and QiiQ Scribe differ most?
The widest separation the AI Health Index records between Cleo Health and QiiQ Scribe is on HIPAA and BAA Posture, where Cleo Health grades B and QiiQ Scribe grades C. That axis sits in the Regulatory and Compliance group, so it should carry the most weight for a buyer whose binding constraint is where regulatory exposure sits and who carries it.
Where do Cleo Health and QiiQ Scribe grade the same?
The AI Health Index grades Cleo Health and QiiQ Scribe the same on several axes, including AI Centrality, Model and Technology Transparency and Model Supply Chain Disclosure. Neither holds an advantage the index can evidence on those axes, so they should not carry weight in a selection between these two.
What have Cleo Health and QiiQ Scribe not disclosed?
At the last review, at least one of Cleo Health and QiiQ Scribe published thin or absent detail on Model Supply Chain Disclosure and AI Liability and Recourse. The AI Health Index treats an absent disclosure as a gap in the public record rather than a failure of the product, so these are the axes to get in writing during diligence instead of inferring from the grade.
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.