💡 What is Heidi Health?
Heidi Health is an AI clinical documentation tool. During a consultation, it listens to the conversation and generates a structured clinical note — history, examination, assessment, plan — ready for you to review, edit, and paste into your PMS.
It was built in Australia specifically for the primary care workflow. It understands clinical language, knows common NZ abbreviations, and is designed to be used on the device you already have at your desk.
What it is not: It is not a diagnostic tool. It does not make clinical decisions. It is a documentation assistant — like having a very accurate medical secretary sitting in the room who types everything up while you focus on the patient.
The core value is simple: instead of spending 8–15 minutes writing up notes after every consult, you spend 90 seconds reviewing and approving what Heidi already drafted. Multiplied across 30 consults a day, that is two to four hours returned to you.
🔐 Setting up your account
Heidi offers a free tier that is genuinely useful — not a crippled trial. Most solo practitioners run on the free tier indefinitely. The paid tier adds team features and integrations.
Go to heidihealth.com and create an account. Use your work email. Sign up takes under 2 minutes.
Set your specialty. This is important. Heidi adjusts its terminology, note structure, and common abbreviations based on your specialty. For general practice, select General Practice / Family Medicine.
Set your note template. Heidi defaults to SOAP (Subjective, Objective, Assessment, Plan). You can customise this — more on mapping to Indici's fields in Module H03.
Install the mobile app on your phone. Even if you plan to use a laptop at your desk, having it on your phone as a backup microphone option is worth it. The phone mic is usually better than the laptop mic — covered in detail in Module H02.
Do a test recording with no patient present. Talk to yourself for 2 minutes about a fictional patient. See what it generates. Get comfortable with the interface before you're in a live consult.
Before going live: Read Module H06 (Privacy & HIPC) first. It takes 25 minutes and will make you confident — not anxious — about using this in your practice.
🗣️ The patient consent moment
This is where most practitioners hesitate. How do I tell patients that an AI is listening? The answer: the same way you'd mention that a registrar is sitting in, or that you're recording for training purposes. Matter-of-fact, brief, and at the start of the consult.
Most patients are fine with it. Some are curious. A small number will say no — and that is completely valid. You simply don't press record.
Here are three different approaches. Use the one that fits your communication style:
If a patient says no: "No problem at all, I'll take notes the usual way." Don't make it awkward. Their comfort matters more than your documentation efficiency in that consult.
You do not need written consent for Heidi — verbal is sufficient. But if your practice has a patient consent policy, check whether it needs updating to mention AI documentation tools.
⚙️ Customising your note template
Heidi's default SOAP structure works well, but you can tune it to match how you write. The goal is to minimise the editing you need to do after generation.
- Add your common abbreviations. If you always write "BP" not "blood pressure," tell Heidi that in your custom instructions. Go to Settings → My Instructions.
- Set the reading level for your notes. Clinical notes for Indici should use clinical language. Patient-facing summaries (Module H04) need plain English. These are separate templates.
- Turn on ACC mode. If you see a lot of ACC claims, there's an ACC-aware note style that includes mechanism of injury and initial treatment — which pre-fills what you need for the ACC45 (Module H05).
- Adjust verbosity. Some practitioners want brief bullet-point notes. Others want full prose. Heidi can do both — set your preference in the template settings.
- Sign up at heidihealth.com (free, 2 minutes)
- Set your specialty to General Practice
- Click New Consultation → Start Recording
- Speak for 2–3 minutes as if you're describing a patient: "45-year-old male presenting with three days of lower back pain after lifting. No radiation, no neurological symptoms..."
- Stop the recording and wait for the note to generate (usually 15–30 seconds)
- Read through the output — notice how it has structured your words into a SOAP note
- Edit one section to see how easy it is to modify
🤔 Common first reactions
- "It got a detail wrong." This will happen, especially early on. Always review before saving to Indici. You are the clinical sign-off — treat Heidi's output like a registrar's draft that you review and approve.
- "It sounds nothing like how I write." That's what the custom instructions are for. Spend 10 minutes in Settings → My Instructions after your first few consults, telling it how you want notes to read.
- "What if the patient says something sensitive?" Sensitive disclosures should be documented carefully regardless of tool. Heidi will capture them — which may actually be better than hurried handwritten notes. Use your clinical judgement about what to include versus document separately.
- "The audio quality is patchy." This is the most common issue. Module H02 covers this in full — it's usually fixable with simple changes to mic placement.