Details
About the Reviewer
Reviewer Organization
Reviewer Tech Stack
Other Products Considered
Summary
Product Usage: Heidi is mainly used for chart building during office visits, especially for automated History of Present Illness (HPI) and Assessment and planning, increasing patient interaction without distraction of EHR documentation.
Strengths: The technology excellently captures specific urology terminologies and is helpful for organizing patient information, such as lab data, chronologically along with timestamps.
Weaknesses: Issues were noted with template’s unpredictable behavior that requires manual correction and the changes don’t seem to influence the user’s overarching profile.
Overall Judgment: Despite few issues with template behavior, Heidi has largely been favourable, promising standardized notes and efficiencies in documentation, and there’s optimism for its integration into regular practice.
Review
Today, we’re chatting about Heidi and how it’s used at your company. Before we begin, could you give a brief overview of the company and your role there?
I’m a physician assistant within a small urology practice.
What was the need that drove you to look for something like Heidi?
We wanted to improve efficiency in documentation, help providers stay caught up with their notes.
What use cases are you using the product for, and how do you integrate it into your workflows?
I use it during the office visit for chart building, particularly the automated History of Present Illness (HPI) and Assessment and Plan tool. It allows more patient interaction without the distraction of me having to document in the EHR. And if I’m unable to complete a note right away, I have the flexibility to revisit it later. It lets me focus on patient dialogue while ensuring documentation is thorough.
What features do you use?
I primarily use the transcription component, and I use different templates for different types of appointments. For example, a standard office visit note differs from a preoperative visit note in the data it captures, particularly in the HPI section, and I use the platform’s editing tool for customization. I use the default template for office visits, and I have a specialized template for preoperative visits.
Heidi also offers a secondary, dictation feature for dictating documents and sections.
Heidi’s powerful Custom Templates allows for truly infinite personalization.
Users can embed flexible smart instructions within templates for any kind of documentation they require, from notes to summaries to assessments.
Using Custom Templates, your documents will have the perfect structure, style, information & dynamic actions. Mitigating the need to ever edit your documents again.
How do you feel about the strength of the technology in picking up terms that may be specific to your specialty?
The technology is quite effective in interpreting dialogue and data specific to urology, particularly prostate cancer care. We don’t use it for medical decision-making, but it excels in organizing patient information, like lab data, chronologically, along with timestamps for easy reference and documentation.
Users can also include custom ‘Replace’ vocabulary for niche terminology and abbreviations to automatically be replaced with desired wording.
Have you integrated Heidi into your EHR?
We haven’t integrated Heidi with our EHR yet. Currently, it functions primarily for scheduling, pulling in my daily appointments and pre-associating notes with patient visits. I’m not sure about its capability to integrate deeply with specific components of the Veradigm EHR, like taking visit information and placing it correctly within the EHR.
Heidi can integrate with all EHR’s using a variety of methods such as API’s, HL7 v2, and/or HL7v3 to push notes back into the EHR to surface patient demographics, scheduling, and other use cases upon request.
Do you use it for coding?
I use it primarily for generating recommendations. My main use involves summarization. I dictate to it the number of images, notes, labs, and tests reviewed, and it provides a summary, which I incorporate into my documentation. This helps me justify higher-level billing in my reports.
Heidi can yield comprehensive billing & coding suggestions. Users can embed these recommendations into notes or supplementary documents such as dedicated billing/coding templates which many clinics already leverage.
What do you feel are some of the strengths and weaknesses that you’ve seen with the platform?
The platform excels at capturing information during patient interactions, highlighting details that might otherwise be missed. However, I’ve experienced issues with consistency; the template’s behavior changes unexpectedly, altering how it organizes and includes information. Correcting this drift is not intuitive.
I’ve attempted to use the built-in dialogue box to address issues, but the corrections appear to be temporary and don’t seem to influence my overarching user profile, only individual sessions.
After a couple of months of working well, I abruptly saw the HPI section being truncated. I switched the settings from the ‘Goldilocks’ level to a more detailed setting, which ends up requiring some manual editing to remove superfluous information, but it ensures the inclusion of all necessary details in the patient narrative.
Have you found the platform to be pretty reliable?
The platform has generally been reliable. The issues we’ve encountered, such as a lag during transcription initiation and resumption, seem to be related to our Wi-Fi rather than the software itself.
How is the integration into your system?
The integration with our system is currently a one-way integration, designed to pull patient appointment information into the AI for note-generation purposes. It’s currently unclear if it will have the capability of writing back into our EHR.
How has account management and support been?
Our account manager has been incredibly helpful and supportive, assisting with setting up accounts for our practice’s providers. He’s been easy to work with.
Heidi offers world class dedicated support for teams and is clinician obsessed to ensure no questions are left unanswered!
Looking back, do you feel like your team made the right call in moving forward with Heidi?
Yes. It’s more user-friendly than Freed AI, which I’ve used before, and we’re optimistic about its integration into our practice. We’re addressing some resistance from a few providers, but I believe fixing issues such as template drift will help. We’d like all the providers to use it, so we can standardize our notes. Since our patients are often seen by multiple providers, consistency in documentation is essential. Heidi shows promise, and so far, there’s no indication that it won’t scale with our needs.
What do you see as areas of potential growth for Heidi?
I think there’s room for growth in their billing functionalities. The ability for the system to provide accurate billing codes would save considerable time, allowing healthcare providers to focus more on patient care. Additionally, improving integration with EHR systems to enable seamless two-way communication would be a good area to focus on.
We’re close to releasing a proprietary model that affixes region-appropriate billing codes to documentation. We have been resistant to taking an approach that is not replicable, or interpretable, and so have approached this cautiously. The feature will begin with common, widely-used code sets (i.e. ICD-10). However it will, later in 2025, support proprietary code-sets uploaded by the organization.
Heidi also offers a secondary, dictation feature for dictating documents and sections.
Heidi’s powerful Custom Templates allows for truly infinite personalization.
Users can embed flexible smart instructions within templates for any kind of documentation they require, from notes to summaries to assessments.
Using Custom Templates, your documents will have the perfect structure, style, information & dynamic actions. Mitigating the need to ever edit your documents again.
Users can also include custom ‘Replace’ vocabulary for niche terminology and abbreviations to automatically be replaced with desired wording.
Heidi can integrate with all EHR’s using a variety of methods such as API’s, HL7 v2, and/or HL7v3 to push notes back into the EHR to surface patient demographics, scheduling, and other use cases upon request.
Heidi can yield comprehensive billing & coding suggestions. Users can embed these recommendations into notes or supplementary documents such as dedicated billing/coding templates which many clinics already leverage.
Heidi offers world class dedicated support for teams and is clinician obsessed to ensure no questions are left unanswered!
We’re close to releasing a proprietary model that affixes region-appropriate billing codes to documentation. We have been resistant to taking an approach that is not replicable, or interpretable, and so have approached this cautiously. The feature will begin with common, widely-used code sets (i.e. ICD-10). However it will, later in 2025, support proprietary code-sets uploaded by the organization.