How to get hours and hours back every week with this one thing

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[00:00:00] Katie Bell: Who would like to get hours back in a week so that you can be present at home, you can maybe go to the gym, you could do all of the fun things in life, rather than write your clinical notes? Clinical notes are the bane of my life and I am absolutely happy to be open and honest that is, it is one of the worst jobs that I have to do in a week.

[00:00:26] Katie Bell: I’m sure you all agree. For several reasons. It’s boring, isn’t it, to do. And as a visionary in your business, that is definitely an activity that Philip would describe as not in our zone of genius. So they’re boring. I tend to forget half of the conversation. And if you’ve been seeing clients for as long as I have, you just, it feels like it’s very monotonous.

[00:00:48] Katie Bell: It takes up an enormous amount of time, energy and money. And we lose out on revenue generating time. And as a clinic owner, that is crucial. We have, in my physio clinic been introduced to a new piece of software, which I’m very excited to say that Tom is here to tell us more about it on today’s episode.

[00:01:13] Katie Bell: Just get ready for this guys, because if you don’t know about this already, you are going to want to know about it, because it is going to literally change your life. Without further ado, let me welcome to this week’s podcast, Tom, who is the CEO and one of the co founders of Heidi.

[00:01:32] Katie Bell: Hi, Tom. Welcome to the podcast.

[00:01:34] Tom: Yeah. Hi, Katie. Thanks for having me on. Excited to be here. I’m so excited to talk to you.

[00:01:40] Katie Bell: Tom, you are one of the co founders of Heidi. Tell our listeners, because we have lots of female names, actually. I have in my clinic, we have Jane as our software, and now we have Heidi.

[00:01:53] Katie Bell: So tell everybody, Tom, who is Heidi and why is she so amazing?

[00:01:59] Tom: Yeah, actually it came from the first product we ever built. So the first AI thing we ever built was. It would take your history and then it would show clinicians a differential diagnosis. So someone thought, Oh it’s a conversation with some, something like a software.

[00:02:13] Tom: And someone said, Oh, maybe we should call it HyDial, like HX to DX or, and then eventually be like, no, no one’s going to know how to spell that. Is Heidi available? The name and then looked it up and yeah, so Heidi was available and that was it. We, just went for it. And yeah it’s been, I think, usually pretty well received.

[00:02:34] Tom: It makes sense, like a, doctor listening in or someone listening in to visit and writing great notes. Yeah. Yeah.

[00:02:41] Katie Bell: Okay. So this, piece of technology software is, it’s a game changer in all honesty. So listeners you have got to tune into this next bit. Do not. Turners off because we are going to give you a way of gaining back hours and hours of your time Which is currently I know when we see patients we are regulated Tom in the UK with a PC so we have standards that we have to work to which is that we have to write patient notes within 24 hours and there has To be you know, as documents in a certain way and but these inevitably take hours of our time Yeah And some longer than others, and we can be writing them at nine o’clock at night while you’re scrabbling around trying to get the kids in bed because you’ve still not finished them, because your day was 14 patients long.

[00:03:32] Katie Bell: Heidi is here to just get you time back and save you, time, save you energy, and ultimately the clinicona save you money, because the amount of time I have to give to my therapist, That is non clinical time to be able to write notes is huge. And that’s revenue generating time.

[00:03:51] Tom: Yeah, exactly. So

[00:03:52] Katie Bell: Heidi basically writes your notes for you.

[00:03:56] Tom: Exactly. More or less. Listen, it’s pretty simple. Like you click start Heidi will listen. So to transcribe the conversation, there’s no, Recording stored or anything permanent. It’s basically just turning it into a transcript as you go. And then we’ll use AI models to turn that transcript, that conversation into a physio note or occupational therapist assessment or basically whatever you need.

[00:04:20] Tom: Yeah. And. I think most people that have used voice to text tools don’t maybe don’t quite understand how amazing these things are like it’s honestly like I’m a doctor by background so imagine if I’m stuck in the computer trying to write like listening and trying to write out what I think that you want from me so yeah it’s amazing like the small talk the Conversations about their day, like it all gets cut out and you just get the kind of perfect clinical note.

[00:04:45] Tom: You can talk about the history at the end or the start. It all just gets ordered and structured the way you would. Yeah, so it was good enough for me to quit vascular surgery training. It was mind blowing to me. It. Everyone was going to use these things. So yeah Heidi, we try to build one of the best ones.

[00:05:04] Tom: We make it free to try and use. Cause I know, it’s a good first impressions. We want people to be able to see it easily. And that’s Heidi.

[00:05:13] Katie Bell: And this this is the room I came in to you guys. So I did a free trial. I’ve got I still see clients, a very small amount of them now, but I decided I’m going to just try the free version because I think I’ve got up to 10 sets of notes written.

[00:05:29] Tom: It’s actually free. Like you don’t even, you don’t even have limited notes. So you can do the notes for it. It’s just some of those pro like custom templates or using, we have a little chat box, but you can use it for free. We have a good group that, that do. Yeah. Wow. I did not know that. That’s amazing.

[00:05:45] Katie Bell: But what it did do was that it meant when my day finished, my day actually finished I didn’t have to go back and think about the sessions that I have in the morning. And as a clinic owner, you’re not just seeing patients, you’re answering emails, you’re speaking to your staff members, you’re firefighting all day long.

[00:06:05] Katie Bell: And clinical notes are the bane of my life, but are obviously so important. So I came along, used the free version, was completely blown away by it, I’ve got one of my team members to trial it as well, who does a lot more clinical work than I would do. She was blown away by it. And then, and now we, we are massive fans of Heidi and we are all of our clinicians are using it.

[00:06:29] Katie Bell: For, me, from a business point of view, I think this is really important that, this has When we looked at the data, Tom, of how many admin slots we were allocating per practitioner, per month, per year, and what that could have been in terms of revenue generated just for a 50 minute admin slot or half an hour admin slot, we were up at 69, 000 of revenue lost

[00:06:56] Tom: over the year.

[00:06:58] Tom: Like a whole salary basically.

[00:07:00] Katie Bell: Absolutely. So then when you look at the investment. And with Heidi, which is going to at least half that, it was a no brainer. I was like the numbers tell me I’ve got to do it.

[00:07:13] Tom: Yeah. Yeah. So, it works out to 400 pounds a year basically for a pro proceed. And I think most, clinicians that use it every day would, probably want it because you can do reports of any kind, the most time consuming things, you can build out templates.

[00:07:28] Tom: We can also help you do it as well. But yeah, I know it’s just, that’s why these sometimes there’s a bit of hype with some of these AI tools people have tried them, but I think specifically for this use case, like clinical notes letters, reports, compliance with billing, all sorts of things.

[00:07:47] Tom: It’s it’s just a no brainer. Like it just does the work for you, basically. You definitely still have to do a bit of reviewing one minute of reviewing as opposed to 30 minutes of typing is much better, absolutely. Yeah.

[00:07:59] Katie Bell: And for some of our clinicians like these are the questions that my team asked me, they were like, if a patient like rubs over an area, but doesn’t describe it out loud, like how do and the more you use it, the more that the ways round stuff so that you would say, Oh that’s your right shoulder.

[00:08:18] Katie Bell: And that looks like it’s over this area. So the more you can talk, the better. But also because you’re not sat there trying to type when people are talking, which is what a lot of clinic clinicians do their writing notes as, the patient is talking to you, which you’re not completely present with what the patient is saying anyway, because you’re too busy trying to write your notes.

[00:08:40] Katie Bell: You’re now fully present with the patient. The AI is picking up everything in the background. It’s cutting out all of the conversation that about politics or about whatever’s going on it doesn’t have any of that in it when it produces the transcript and then a click of a button, you can turn it into a GP letter or another, whatever it is that you want.

[00:09:04] Tom: Exactly. Yeah. And I think. It’s, interesting because like when I, so when I went into medicine, I had an old GP that actually had cue cards. So he would write a single line for every appointment, like very old fashioned, no EHR, like paper scripts. And so when, so that was my vision of what being clinical would be like walk in the room, do something great for the patient, walk out.

[00:09:27] Tom: Don’t, you don’t have, there’s no like admin burden that comes with it, but it’s not like that at all. You’ve got maybe best case, like 10 minutes of admin work. Each patient probably worst case, 20 minutes or a bit more. And so you just get this debt built up at the end of the day. You’re like going to stay all of these things that I haven’t done during the day and I have to stay and do them.

[00:09:47] Tom: Yeah, so it’s, just amazing. You get to flip to being, doing them as you go. So then you can go home, your notes are done. Feel free to spend your night how you like.

[00:09:57] Katie Bell: I don’t know. Our listeners are going to love this, Tom. One of the other great things is that, so one of the questions my team asked me was what happens when we do treatment?

[00:10:06] Katie Bell: And we might not be talking, we won’t be going through. I don’t know. Mobilizing somebody’s L4 facet joint or whatever. You can just add that in, can’t you? At the end, you can talk to it when the patient’s left.

[00:10:19] Tom: Yeah. So you can leave it recording and when the patient, leaves you can, just give Heidi like a little dictation of what, your examination was.

[00:10:28] Tom: You can also click stop. And then there’s a little, it says resume. So you can click resume and just add some additional information or findings or things that might be worth Heidi knowing. You can also say things you wouldn’t say out loud, like maybe I’m actually not worried about this patient, they walked in, they were super happy, healthy, they didn’t have an unintelligent gait they weren’t protecting that joint at all I’m not as worried as maybe the way the transcript sounded, and then Heidi will write the note for you.

[00:10:57] Tom: Given that information, it’s the same thing. It’s if you were trapped in the computer and all you heard was like, this is the worst pain in my life. And I planted, and then I heard a pop and, but then like they they walked in and they ran on the treadmill and there was no issue, then you would write a note entirely differently.

[00:11:13] Tom: So you have to really, that’s why we often in on the website. And when we talk about it, it’s like a resident or a physio or a twin inside the computer. Like you just have to tell. Tell Heidi how to think about the patient and then it’ll usually do a pretty good job.

[00:11:30] Tom: And yeah,

[00:11:33] Katie Bell: it’s it just blows my mind. When I was using it, you just think it’s not going to we were testing it on a live demo with Scott, your colleague, the other day with my team. And, They almost wanted it to not work, because again, this can’t possibly, this cannot possibly translate what I’ve just said into a soap note.

[00:11:55] Katie Bell: And then, sure enough, in front of our eyes, within about 12 seconds, it was there. And one of the great things is that you’re now integrating with more and more clinic booking sort of management systems. So some of them can just send the information straight into whatever it is that you’re using. Some of, and if you can, If it’s not integrated you just copy and paste it across and it’s really simple.

[00:12:20] Tom: Yeah. We’re bringing on more systems all the time. Like we had a couple of conversations with Jane, Emus and then the system one and a bunch of others. So yeah, we’re working through a lot of them. Yeah. And it’s, definitely. It’s also quite cool how you can go from structured, unstructured conversation to like structured data where you have like dropdowns and problems lists and all the things that the EHRs do well or the ERPs.

[00:12:50] Tom: We, yeah, we will definitely get there. It will just take a bit of time to get it all set up. Yeah, just chat to us. We can, we’re happy to help you set it up for you.

[00:12:58] Katie Bell: Yeah. And I think that’s a great thing that I think you guys do really well is that the onboarding side of stuff is you will basically create bespoke templates that mimic what we have within our clinic booking system.

[00:13:12] Katie Bell: that we currently write our notes in. So it just, it’s seamless. It’s just super easy, than, to use.

[00:13:18] Tom: Yeah. Yeah. I always imagined like my, so I had some bosses who would not let me write notes without using particular shorthand. Like they wanted HCM for Karimapathy but, then never write ACS.

[00:13:33] Tom: I want you to write acute coronary syndrome in full, like all this irrational mess. So we made. We made the templating very customizable, so you can edit it down to the sentence if you want. Yeah, but we’re happy to help. Like we know not everyone is tech savvy enough to, figure it out.

[00:13:52] Tom: Yeah, we’ve got a UK team, Rags and Scott, and the team can help you out.

[00:13:57] Katie Bell: Yeah. And you, really are like super helpful and, speedy and responding and just everything from my perspective has been seamless. And we’ve got lots of clients already that are using Heidi and I would really encourage anybody listening to this who was drowning in patient notes to really.

[00:14:18] Katie Bell: Honor and value your time in a, better way, because writing clinical notes is one of those essential parts of your business, But most clinicians don’t factor that in to the charge. If we charge somebody for a 30 minute follow up, most of us are going to do 30 minutes with the patient, and then the notes come after that.

[00:14:42] Katie Bell: And I think that’s right in a lot of ways. I think that’s the professional way to do it. I wouldn’t want to see somebody for 15 minutes and then say, Oh, your other 15 minutes is me writing all your notes up. I can see both arguments, but from a, I don’t know, from a customer experience point of view, I think I’ve made towards the spending the time with the patients, but we don’t charge for it.

[00:15:02] Katie Bell: So therefore all of that time. It’s not revenue generating. It’s just another thing that we’re having to do on top of everything else in the clinic.

[00:15:10] Tom: Yeah, exactly. Yeah. You don’t want, I don’t think we want clinical specialists to end up like lawyers where the clock starts and you’ve got a scope of notes and whatever else.

[00:15:20] Tom: But yeah, so hopefully, I think for most people, Heidi should save them that time. 80 percent of that time will be will, be gone if you use it. Yeah.

[00:15:29] Katie Bell: Yeah. And, I hope that this is appropriate to say to our listeners, but we we work with many, clinic owners and some of them have additional learning needs and they’re very clear about that when they join us and we do whatever we possibly can Thrive to support them and look after them.

[00:15:47] Katie Bell: But I have clinicians in my clinic that, that have dyslexia or, and this is just a huge weight off their shoulders because it takes them longer to write the notes, understandably. And we have to give them more time to do that. But this just takes all of that.

[00:16:05] Tom: Like my favorite stories are the ones we’ve had.

[00:16:10] Tom: Some people even go back to work who just wouldn’t, cope with all of the administrative work. Yeah, lots of stories like people who, who have hearing challenges who kind of lip read and now they can, cause Heidi is listening. They can sometimes things they might’ve misheard or misunderstood that they’ve got a transcript of.

[00:16:30] Tom: Yeah it’s, really great. Like actually the part of it that’s underrated is the memory part of it. I think even when I was using it in practice, I didn’t realize how many things I didn’t remember until I started using Heidi you’d have a 35 minute visit or a longer conversation.

[00:16:47] Tom: And I, yeah, they did say that, didn’t they? I didn’t remember that they said that they, their back pain and started six months ago. I thought it was six weeks ago or and you go back and you’re like, yeah, actually that is right. And It’s almost, it’s the opposite of what people think. Some people think, Oh, it’s going to insert all these false details.

[00:17:04] Tom: It’s going to be incorrect. I’m going to just stuff up my notes, but actually more often it’s the other way around. Like I was already going to stuff up the notes worse and now it’s reminded me of three things that I forgot about.

[00:17:13] Katie Bell: Absolutely. Yeah. And I think. The longer that you’ve been in practice, the harder notes become to write, because when you’re newly qualified you’re like doing everything all in detail and it’s really lengthy and then you are like me.

[00:17:32] Katie Bell: And you’ve also been seeing these patients for a long time. Yeah,

[00:17:36] Tom: yeah.

[00:17:36] Katie Bell: You just write notes like you’ve known them your whole life and actually from a handover point of view and from a, legal point of view, that’s not right. And you need to be doing thorough notes. So the, how he does all of this for old timers like me.

[00:17:51] Tom: No, it’s, yeah, it’s so nice to. Okay. Cause when I left, it was a bit sci fi. I last I practice medically was end of 2021 and it was still like a little early for some of these tools. Like it’s definitely gotten better, but it was still pretty cool back then. So to see how many people are really enjoying it, I was glad I’m not crazy I can.

[00:18:17] Tom: Yeah, I can tell the in laws that I made the right decision, you definitely have, Tom, you definitely have. So one of the big questions that I think is a lot of listeners will be, thinking about and possibly wanting to ask you, Tom, is what, how do we sit with this from a data protection and privacy point of view?

[00:18:37] Tom: Yeah. So it’s a good question. It depends where you practice. So if you have, if you’re out in private practice, maybe slightly different to if you’re working with the NHS, but I’ll just give a general answer. Yeah, let me just talk through the data flow just so everyone understands what happened.

[00:18:52] Tom: So when you click start Heidi’s transcribing that audio. So we’re not storing that recording permanently. There’s no audio stored. It’s just turning that into a text and we have pseudonymization processes. So basically we’re protecting the patient health information from any of the services we use to process it.

[00:19:13] Tom: Even though services we have non retention and, UK GDPR compliance service that we work with, but even still just for extra protection, we have those extra layers in place. So essentially. No one can see the transcript except you on your account. At Heidi, we can support you by regenerating it and triggering a few other things to like reprocess it, but we can’t see the notes, we can’t see any of the private patient information.

[00:19:40] Tom: And then as far as retention goes, Basically, all you’re left with is the transcript and the notes. And there’s two choices. Clinicians are split. You can definitely keep all the sessions on Heidi. We secure the data at the highest possible standards. We have ISO certification and SOC 2 as well, which are just basically we get audited by third parties to make sure that our servers are as secure as they can be.

[00:20:07] Tom: But then you can also set it so that Heidi automatically delete sessions after a day or a week. Three weeks, however long you want to retain the sessions for. And it’s up to you. Like we’re not trying to be your ERP. We’re meant to be a tool you’re using at a long site. So you can, copy, copy the notes in and delete them.

[00:20:27] Tom: Or if you want to keep the sessions, you can do that too. I think what else, and then we don’t use any of. Any of the identifiable data for training or for we don’t sell data. Sometimes people think because of the free product it’s like some sort of data mining tool or something. It’s not at all.

[00:20:44] Tom: We just think it’s the best strategy to get people to use it because it’s a lower barrier. They don’t have to put in their credit card. They can just give it a try. So yeah, we like the maths works enough. People pay after they use the free that it pays for the free. So it’s, fine. And.

[00:21:02] Tom: Yeah, the only thing in our terms is, so we do have some aggregated data, which is basically for things like analytics. Like we can say Heidi’s working really well for physios in this area or not so well in these conditions, but that’s always the identified and aggregated and we let people opt out of it as well.

[00:21:18] Tom: So if they don’t want to have any analytics, that’s fine. But it just means we can’t do, can’t really do any support like either works or it doesn’t. And then we can’t, help you. Yeah, that’s kind of it. But always like we know in the NHS, the trusts have their own compliance process and yeah, sometimes I have to talk to the ICB, IT teams, very happy to do that, go through that process with you.

[00:21:41] Tom: And yeah, we’ve got a few trusts live and a bunch more in compliance at the moment just reach out to us. That’s the easiest way to have to answer your questions. That’s really helpful, Tom. And I think one of the other things that actually Scott, your colleague, was talking to me about last week.

[00:21:58] Katie Bell: I said do we have to let patients know that we’ve got this running in the background? How do we communicate that to patients? Scott was saying that actually legally we don’t have to tell them because this isn’t, all we’re doing is basically recording and creating a transcript.

[00:22:16] Tom: Yeah. And there’s no audio being stored. Yeah.

[00:22:19] Katie Bell: Correct. So he’s you legally don’t have to, I think ethically, Yeah. And probably the right thing to do is to just say to your patients, I have a dictation software running in the background just to help me write my clinical notes. Are you happy with that?

[00:22:32] Katie Bell: Rather than using the, I’m using AAI because a lot of my patients would think, what?

[00:22:37] Tom: That

[00:22:39] Katie Bell: feels a bit more scary.

[00:22:41] Tom: And I think I don’t know the, word AI has been getting thrown around a lot these days, but it’s, really just a lot of software for the longest time. Like when you do a Google search, it’s using the same machine learning that, Heidi uses it’s not like that meaningfully different.

[00:22:57] Tom: Yeah, essentially it’s just software. It’s running through a processing process and it comes back with the notes. Yeah, it’s interesting. Like even, with GDPR, the whole transcript it’s not. It’s not really regulated directly, like they talk about like how to treat data and consent and secondary use, of course, but you, as a clinician, when you’re in the visit with the patient, you’re already doing documentation.

[00:23:21] Tom: You are doing that process and you’re using a tool to do that process. And because we don’t have any secondary use, we don’t sell the data. There’s no use of the PHI for training the models or anything like that. Yeah, it’s not like officially really in a court of law. You don’t have to do it, but I think it makes sense just in case they see the blinking red light on the tab it’s probably worth mentioning that I used to say like I’m using transcription tool.

[00:23:47] Tom: Basically it means I don’t have to do the computer while listen, they don’t install a recording. It’s just going to make my notes for me. Are you okay with that? And they can say yes or no. If they say no, then I can always just turn it on and give Heidi a quick spiel at the end of my visit just to explain like what kind of patient it was.

[00:24:02] Tom: And if you have a template, Heidi will write and you can say things like, just make some reasonable assumptions based on this, like it’s a classic X, Y, Z, and then it will, elaborate a bit beyond what you said, and then you can pair it back and edit it up the way you like. One. That’s really clever.

[00:24:20] Katie Bell: And I think that’s the important thing, isn’t it, is just to build it into your customer journey where we’re just adding it into our workflow when people book in. It’s just a, just to let you know, our therapist user. Like the registration forms, quite common, like people pop that in just to make sure they’re happy with that.

[00:24:38] Tom: Yeah, exactly.

[00:24:40] Katie Bell: Yeah. It’s amazing. I love it. Tom every listener is going to be wanting to get a free trial with you and they’re going to want to explore this further. We have a special link for them on going on the show notes, don’t we? So if you listen to this, just scroll down, go to the show notes and click the link there and that’s going to get them access to be able to have a free trial.

[00:25:02] Tom: Yes. Yeah. So basically if you had to use it for free, the kind of the free mode regardless, but yeah with Katie’s link, you’ll get a free 30 day trials, a longer trial, a pro so that’s the custom templates to chat to AI to make some edits. Yeah, and happy, to support you through the process.

[00:25:20] Tom: So just don’t hesitate to message us. We have a little bubble on the page where you can chat to us. Yeah, and probably either Scott or Rags from the team will, be happy to help.

[00:25:29] Katie Bell: Tom are you ready for it? The amount of people that are going to be on that button now. I’m wanting to talk to you all because everyone’s going to love it.

[00:25:37] Katie Bell: We’re

[00:25:38] Tom: ready. The rags on the team are ready.

[00:25:40] Katie Bell: Great. Tom, thank you so much for spending some time explaining to our listeners about just the power of AI and this amazing, thing that you’ve created.

[00:25:50] Tom: Thank you. No, I really appreciate it. It feels humbling to