Heidi Team
"What I've regained is my own private time." — Dr Jane McNae
Key outcomes:
Deborah Hawthorne
Consultant Pharmacist
Heidi Team
Dr. Alex Hwong-Ruey Leow
Consultant Gastroenterologist and Hepatologist
Heidi Team
Read on if you might also be experiencing:
Paws in Motion is Hong Kong's first dedicated pet physiotherapy and rehabilitation practice, founded by Dr Jane McNae, a veterinary surgeon and certified rehabilitation therapist with nearly 30 years in the city. The work sits outside general veterinary practice: detailed musculoskeletal and neurological assessment, pain management, and tailored rehabilitation plans.
A new-patient session runs for an hour of contact time, with another hour of prep before it. Every case ends with three separate documents: a clinical record for Jane's own use, a detailed report for the referring vet, and an accessible summary for the pet owner. Each one matters.
For each new patient, two hours of post-session work on top of the prep and the appointment. As a solo owner, the client-facing day was already at capacity. The admin had to go somewhere. It went into evenings and weekends.
"I was saving up all those cases and doing it on a weekend. Six hours on a weekend. Just nailing some of those." — Dr Jane McNae
The cost wasn't only the time. It was carrying unfinished cases in her head through the week.
"We do very bespoke physiotherapy veterinary work, so it doesn't follow your standard subjective, objective, assessment and plan." — Dr Jane McNae
Jane spent a full year with a US-based veterinary AI scribe before finding Heidi. The special tests she needed documented didn't fit any template the system offered.
Within a month of finding Heidi, the picture had changed. Jane uploaded several completed PAWS Pawprint templates and past reports. Heidi learned the structure and voice of her work, suggested refined templates she could shape further, and started producing the three documents she needed from a single recording.
Heidi records throughout the full hour, including the stretches where Jane's veterinary nurse takes the client's history in Cantonese or Mandarin and feeds the highlights back to her in English.
"My skilled nurse has to read aloud what is important at the time. Now, as I'm looking at it at the end, I can see all of that information appearing." — Dr Jane McNae
After nearly thirty years working across English, Cantonese and Mandarin in Hong Kong, Jane knows how easily subtle clinical detail can be lost in translation. That worry is gone.
Referring practices send patient histories that run long. Sixty pages spanning fifteen years isn't unusual, and a small subset of it is what Jane actually needs.
"Instead of having myself or a staff member scroll through those documents for an hour and copying and pasting what we want, we can ask it to summarise the musculoskeletal information. If I need more details, I can dig back in." — Dr Jane McNae
The same workflow handles documents in other languages. A recent client from Switzerland brought twenty pages of Swiss German medical records. Heidi translated and summarised them into a clear account of what had happened nine years earlier. Jane used it in the session and sent it back to the family vet.
"Quite extraordinary." — Dr Jane McNae
Cantonese, Mandarin and English in the room. Swiss German in the inbox. One workflow handles all of it.
During a recent gait analysis, Jane navigated into Heidi Evidence inside the same session. Without leaving the consultation, she read that the pacing gait she was observing was commonly associated with the hip issue she had already identified.
"Without that popping into my field of view yesterday, that's the type of thing I would look up in my own time at night." — Dr Jane McNae
Evidence draws on what's already been discussed in the session and surfaces relevant context: clinical patterns, research, decision-support prompts. For a specialist working across complex, individualised cases, the reading she used to do at night is starting to live in the room.
The weekends are hers again. So are the evenings.
"I'd already maximised my client-facing time. I had to give up my own private time to manage it to my expectations. What I've regained is my own private time." — Dr Jane McNae
She's spending it with her cats and on a new bike. A gravel trip is coming up and she's been training for it.
The same gain is starting to open a second door. With documentation no longer pulling on the rest of the day, Jane is looking at where she can fit another session or two into the week.
"I think I'm going to be able to help more pets." — Dr Jane McNae
Heidi is rolling out further across Paws in Motion. New-patient sessions came first. Shorter follow-ups are next. Jane is also watching for Heidi's live translation features. With a trilingual caseload that includes Cantonese- and Mandarin-speaking owners, live two-way translation would let her engage more directly in the room, rather than running everything through a nurse.
The ambition is the one she started with: help more pets, and keep doing the careful, detailed work that defines the practice, without giving up the rest of her life to it.
