Freed vs Ask Brigid: AI Scribe or Full Platform for Irish Consultants

What Freed actually does and where it stops

Freed is an AI medical scribe that listens to a clinical encounter and produces a structured note, typically in SOAP format. It does this well. The product is designed to remove the post-clinic dictation burden: you see a patient, Freed transcribes, you review and approve. That is the full scope of what Freed does, and it is worth being precise about that before comparing anything.

Freed launched in the United States and is built around American clinical documentation conventions. It produces notes. It does not manage appointments, generate Irish-format referral or discharge letters, handle VHI or Laya pre-authorisation requests, raise invoices, process insurer fee schedules, or coordinate across multiple hospital sites. For a US ambulatory practice whose billing and scheduling sit in a separate system, that narrow focus is often enough. For an Irish private consultant operating across the Beacon, Mater Private or Hermitage Clinic with a medical secretary managing three insurers, it is a different calculation.

The AI scribe category is growing fast. Freed is one of the better-known products in it, alongside Heidi Health and Microsoft DAX Copilot. Our earlier comparison of Heidi vs Ask Brigid covers the scribe-versus-platform question in parallel, and most of the structural issues are the same: a scribe is a documentation tool, not a practice management system.

Freed's pricing is subscription-based, marketed in USD. At time of writing the solo plan sits around $99/month. There is no Irish data residency commitment publicly documented, which matters for GDPR compliance under the Data Protection Act 2018 and the requirements set by the Data Protection Commission for transfers of special-category health data outside the EU.

The note quality is genuinely good. Consultants who have trialled it in the US report that it handles specialist terminology accurately and produces notes that need minimal editing. If clean, fast clinical documentation is your only unsolved problem, Freed deserves serious consideration. The question this article addresses is whether that is your only unsolved problem.

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Why Irish consultants need more than a scribe

Irish private consultants carry an administrative load that has no direct equivalent in the US ambulatory market Freed was built for. Multi-insurer billing, pre-authorisation workflows, multi-site practice, HealthLink correspondence, and Irish-format medico-legal letters mean that documentation is only one piece of the overhead. A scribe addresses one piece. The rest remains.

Consider what a typical urology outpatient session at a private hospital actually generates. A six-patient flexible cystoscopy list might produce: six clinical notes, four referral letters back to the referring GP, two letters to the patient's insurer for pre-auth on a subsequent procedure, one letter to a radiologist requesting a CT KUB, two invoices to VHI, one invoice to Laya Healthcare, one self-pay invoice, and follow-up entries on the PSA surveillance pathway for three patients. Freed handles the six clinical notes. The other fourteen items are untouched.

The multi-insurer environment is particularly sharp. VHI, Laya Healthcare, Irish Life Health and Aviva each have different fee schedules, different pre-authorisation requirements, and different claims submission formats. According to the Health Insurance Authority's 2023 annual report, over 2.3 million people in Ireland held private health insurance at year-end 2022. For a consultant running 200 to 300 outpatient appointments a month, the billing permutations across those four insurers represent a substantial administrative overhead that no scribe touches.

There is also the HealthLink question. Irish hospital correspondence still travels heavily through HealthLink, the national clinical messaging infrastructure. Referral letters and discharge summaries that arrive into or depart from a private consultant's practice need to conform to Irish conventions, reference the correct HSE or private hospital headers, and route correctly. US-trained AI products are not calibrated for this. The letter that Freed's note becomes still needs to be drafted, formatted and dispatched by someone.

Multi-site practice adds another layer. A urologist working out of three private hospitals in the same week has appointment lists, theatre lists, and correspondence queues distributed across those sites. Coordinating them through a single system is an organisational challenge that sits entirely outside what any AI scribe addresses. The scribe produces a note. Where that note goes, how it connects to the appointment record and the billing entry, is a separate problem.

How Ask Brigid handles the full patient and billing workflow

Ask Brigid (formerly MedProAI) is a practice management platform, not a scribe. It includes AI-assisted documentation, but documentation is one module within a broader system that covers scheduling, multi-insurer billing, pre-authorisation tracking, letter generation and patient-facing administration. The distinction matters because the purchase decision is different: you are buying a system, not a feature.

The billing module is built specifically for the Irish insurer landscape. VHI, Laya Healthcare, Irish Life Health and Aviva fee schedules are configured within the platform. Pre-authorisation requests can be tracked per insurer per procedure. Invoices are raised against the correct insurer tariff without manual cross-referencing. For a urology practice billing TRUS biopsy, urodynamics, flexible cystoscopy and haematuria clinics across multiple insurers, this removes a category of error that medical secretaries spend considerable time correcting.

On the documentation side, Brigid drafts clinical letters, referral letters and discharge summaries from the consultation record. The clinician reviews and approves. Brigid never autonomously sends a referral or makes a clinical determination. The human-in-the-loop structure is not optional; it is how the system is designed, and it is the only configuration appropriate for regulated healthcare correspondence.

The platform is EU-hosted on AWS Dublin and built for GDPR compliance and HIQA standards. Special-category health data does not leave Irish jurisdiction. For a consultant who has been advised by their indemnifier or hospital group to confirm data residency before adopting any AI tool, this is a straightforward answer rather than an investigation.

The patient-facing side is handled through Meet Brigid, Ask Brigid's companion app. Patients book appointments, complete intake forms before their visit, view their letters and results, and pay their bill from their phone. In a urology context, this is practical for PSA surveillance patients who attend repeatedly: they arrive with intake already done, their previous letters are visible to them in the app, and the administrative friction of each visit is lower. One Meet Brigid account can connect to more than one Ask Brigid clinic, and the patient chooses, category by category, exactly what to share with each clinic. Control sits with the patient, not with the practice system.

Pricing runs from €129/month (Essential) to €299/month (Professional) to €599/month (Enterprise). All plans include a 7-day free trial with no credit card required and 48-hour setup. For a fuller picture of how Ask Brigid sits relative to other Irish practice management platforms, the 2026 Irish practice management software comparison covers the main alternatives including DGL, iMedDoc and Socrates.

Freed vs Ask Brigid: a direct comparison for Irish private practice

Freed solves clinical documentation speed. Ask Brigid solves practice operations. In most Irish consultant practices they are not competing for the same job, which means the real question is often not which one to pick, but whether Freed adds enough on top of a platform to justify the cost.

Capability	Freed	Ask Brigid
AI clinical note (SOAP)	Yes, core product	Yes, included
Irish-format referral and discharge letters	No	Yes
Multi-insurer billing (VHI, Laya, Irish Life, Aviva)	No	Yes
Pre-authorisation tracking	No	Yes
Appointment scheduling	No	Yes
Patient app (booking, results, billing)	No	Yes (Meet Brigid)
EU/Irish data residency	Not publicly confirmed	Yes (AWS Dublin)
Irish private hospital workflow context	No (US-built)	Yes
Pricing (indicative)	~$99/month USD	€129-€599/month EUR
Setup time	Minutes (app-based)	48 hours

Freed's genuine strengths deserve stating plainly. Onboarding is fast, note quality is high, and for a consultant who only wants to fix the post-clinic documentation backlog without touching anything else in their practice, it is a low-friction option. If your medical secretary already handles billing competently, your letter templates are working, and your only frustration is sitting at a desk at 7pm dictating notes, Freed may be exactly right.

The GDPR position requires more scrutiny than Freed's marketing makes obvious. Special-category health data processed by an AI system needs a clear legal basis, a data processing agreement that complies with GDPR Article 28, and documented data residency. The Data Protection Commission's guidance on international transfers is specific: standard contractual clauses are required when health data moves outside the EU. A consultant adopting Freed should confirm this paper trail exists before using it with patient data in Ireland. That is due diligence, not a reason to reject it.

One worked example. A urology registrar in a Dublin private hospital trialled Freed for eight weeks during outpatient urology clinics. Note quality was good, haematuria and BPH consultations translated cleanly into structured notes, and the registrar estimated saving 25 to 30 minutes per clinic session on documentation. The notes still needed to become referral letters, billing still needed to be entered manually, and the pre-auth for a TURP on one patient took three email exchanges with VHI that Freed had no role in. The scribe delivered on its promise. The surrounding infrastructure did not improve.

Which tool fits your practice, and when to consider using both

The decision comes down to where your administrative burden actually sits. If documentation is your only significant overhead and your billing, scheduling and correspondence are well managed, Freed is a targeted, fast solution. If you are running a multi-insurer, multi-site private practice with a medical secretary managing significant administrative volume, a full platform will address more of your cost and time than a scribe alone can.

There is also a legitimate case for using both, though the cost needs to be weighed honestly. Freed at roughly $99/month plus a practice management platform at €129 to €299/month means paying for two systems with some functional overlap in documentation. The question is whether Freed's note quality meaningfully exceeds what the platform's AI documentation produces. In many cases the platform note will be sufficient. A consultant with very specific documentation preferences or a particularly complex documentation load may find the specialist scribe worth the additional cost.

The Irish Medical Council's guidance on professional competence is clear that documentation standards are the clinician's responsibility regardless of what tool produces the draft. The note you approve is your note. The tool is the drafting mechanism, not the clinical author.

Use this checklist to make the call for your own practice:

• Is your only bottleneck post-clinic dictation? If yes, a scribe like Freed may be sufficient. If billing, pre-auth, or letters are also a problem, you need a platform.
• Do you operate across more than one private hospital site? If yes, coordination overhead is a platform problem, not a documentation problem.
• Can you confirm EU data residency for any AI tool you adopt? If not, that is a compliance gap to close before going live with patient data.
• Does your current setup handle multi-insurer billing without manual errors? If not, a scribe will not help you here.
• How much of your medical secretary's time goes to correspondence rather than billing? If correspondence dominates, AI letter drafting in a platform may reclaim more time than a scribe does.
• Are you in a documentation-heavy specialty like urology, where each clinic generates referral letters, pre-auth requests and follow-up pathways? The more diverse your document output, the less a pure scribe addresses.

For most Irish urology consultants, documentation is not the largest cost centre in the practice. Billing errors, insurer pre-auth delays, secretary time on correspondence, and the coordination overhead of multi-site working typically represent more recoverable time and money. A tool that fixes only documentation will improve one metric. A platform fixes several at once.

If you want to trial an AI scribe before committing to a full platform, that is a reasonable sequence. Use Freed for one or two clinic sessions to see how much documentation time it genuinely recovers. Then audit what is left: if the billing and letter problems are still present and significant, you have your answer about whether a platform is the next step.

For a broader look at how Ask Brigid compares to other tools used in Irish private practice, including legacy systems still common in consultant rooms, the urology-specific platform page covers workflow integration in more detail.

Practical next step today: Pull your last month's post-clinic hours and split them into documentation time versus billing and correspondence time. The ratio tells you whether a scribe or a platform addresses the larger problem. If documentation is under 40% of the overhead, a scribe alone will not move the needle enough to justify the change.

Ask Brigid (formerly MedProAI) offers a 7-day free trial for Irish consultant practices, with no credit card required and 48-hour setup. Start at auth.medproai.com.

Frequently asked questions about freed vs ask brigid

Is Freed available for Irish consultants?

Freed is a US-developed AI scribe and can be used by clinicians in Ireland, but it is not built around Irish insurer billing workflows such as VHI or Laya. Consultants would need a separate system to handle those tasks.

Does Ask Brigid include an AI scribe like Freed?

Ask Brigid includes AI-assisted documentation tools as part of its platform, so consultants are not required to subscribe to a separate scribe product, though the specific feature set should be confirmed directly with the Ask Brigid team for your specialty.

What is Meet Brigid and how does it relate to Ask Brigid?

Meet Brigid is the patient-facing app connected to Ask Brigid. Patients use it to book appointments, pay bills, view letters and documents, and complete intake forms. They control what they share with each clinic and can revoke access at any time.

Can a consultant use Freed alongside Ask Brigid?

Yes, some consultants use a standalone scribe for note drafting and a separate practice platform for everything else. The practical question is whether the added subscription cost and the step of moving between two systems is worth it compared to using a single integrated platform.