🎯 Why capture quality matters so much
Heidi Health is only as good as the audio it receives. If the transcription is full of gaps, wrong words, or missed sentences, you spend more time correcting than you would have spent writing the notes yourself. That's when people quit.
The frustrating thing is that the tool is not the problem. Heidi's transcription engine is excellent. The problem is almost always the audio signal going in. Fix the input, and the output becomes genuinely remarkable.
The biggest single improvement most practitioners can make: Stop using the built-in laptop microphone and use a phone instead. This one change typically takes capture quality from "frustratingly patchy" to "works almost every time."
💻 Why laptop mics fail in consulting rooms
Laptop microphones are designed to capture one person — the person sitting directly in front of the screen. In a consulting room, they face several problems simultaneously:
- Distance. The patient is 1–2 metres away. Laptop mics are optimised for 30–50 cm. Everything beyond that sounds thin and distant.
- Directionality. Most laptop mics point upward or toward the screen. In a side-by-side consultation posture, the patient is off-axis — exactly where mic sensitivity drops off.
- Keyboard noise. If you type anything during the consult, that keystroke noise is directly on top of the mic and drowns out speech.
- HVAC and background noise. Clinical rooms often have ventilation running. Laptop mics have minimal noise cancellation. What sounds like background hum to you sounds like loud interference to the mic.
- Hard surfaces. Linoleum floors, clinical tables, wall tiles — these surfaces create echo and reverb that confuses transcription.
📱 The phone on the desk — your best free upgrade
Modern phone microphones are substantially better than laptop mics for room capture. They use multiple microphones with beamforming (directional processing) and active noise cancellation designed for exactly the scenario of capturing speech in a room with background noise.
Where to put the phone: On the desk or consultation table, roughly equidistant between you and the patient, ideally within 40–60 cm of both voices. Face up is fine. Don't put it in a pocket or under anything.
The Heidi mobile app is optimised for this. It has an ambient recording mode specifically designed for "device on desk between two people." Use the app, not a browser recording.
If you're worried about the phone being a distraction, put it face-down (mic side up) or use a small phone stand — available for $10–15 at any Warehouse Stationery.
🎤 When you want something better
If you see high volumes of patients and documentation quality is critical, a dedicated microphone makes a noticeable difference. You don't need anything expensive.
Don't overthink the hardware. Start with your phone on the desk. That single change fixes 80% of capture problems. Only buy a dedicated mic if you're doing this at scale and the phone isn't cutting it after a week of use.
🗣️ Speaking habits that help transcription
Transcription quality isn't just about hardware. How you and your patients speak during the consult matters too.
- Don't interrupt each other. Overlapping speech is hard for AI to transcribe. In practice, this just means being slightly more deliberate about turn-taking — which most clinicians already do naturally in history-taking.
- Say medication names clearly. Medical terminology is the hardest thing for transcription. If Heidi gets "metoprolol" wrong, it's worth the 3 seconds to speak it clearly. Or correct it in the review step.
- Summarise what you've decided. At the end of the consult, briefly verbalising your plan — "So today I'm prescribing X, referring to Y, and we'll review in 4 weeks" — gives Heidi a clear Assessment/Plan section to work with.
- Don't trail off when you're thinking. Partial sentences mid-thought ("So I'm thinking, um, maybe we should... let me just...") create noise in the transcript. Heidi usually handles this, but it's tidier if you've finished forming a thought before speaking.
🔧 When the capture is bad — what to do
Sometimes a recording just doesn't come out well. This is normal, especially in your first week. Here's how to recover:
- Use Heidi's edit mode. The generated note will have sections marked as unclear or low-confidence. Click into those sections and correct them.
- Re-record a specific section. Heidi lets you re-record just the Assessment/Plan at the end of the consult as a dictation, even if the main recording was ambient. This hybrid approach works well — ambient for the history, dictation for your clinical reasoning.
- Use dictation mode for complex consults. For a particularly complex case, switch to dictation mode — speak directly into the mic like a voice memo, and Heidi transcribes and structures it. Lower ambient noise tolerance, higher clarity.
- Flag and move on. For a bad recording, note in Indici that the entry was manually drafted. Don't spend 10 minutes trying to salvage a bad recording. Write it up the old way and refine your setup for next time.
- In your consulting room, do three 1-minute test recordings with the same script
- Recording 1: laptop mic as you'd normally use it
- Recording 2: phone (with Heidi app) on the desk in front of you
- Recording 3: phone placed equidistant between where you sit and where the patient usually sits
- Compare the three transcripts — look at word accuracy, especially medication names and clinical terms
- The best setup is your baseline going forward