Heidi Team
"I feel lost without Heidi being there in the room. It gives me that assurance that I can fully concentrate on the person — that I don't have to worry about missing a note, that I'm not running to the car to scribble things down." — Deborah Hawthorne, Consultant Pharmacist
Key outcomes:
Dr. Alex Hwong-Ruey Leow
Consultant Gastroenterologist and Hepatologist
Heidi Team
Dr. Jane McNae
Veterinary Surgeon & Certified Rehabilitation Therapist
Heidi Team
Read on if you might also be experiencing:
Deb Hawthorne is a consultant pharmacist working across north-east Victoria. Her main role is Home Medicine Reviews (HMRs): GP-referred visits to patients at home to assess their medications, identify safety risks, and send recommendations back to the treating clinician. She travels up to 1,000 kilometres some weeks to reach the farms, small towns, and communities spread across her region. In an area where access to healthcare is limited and the average age in her own town is around 65, her work sits at the intersection of clinical pharmacology, rural health equity, and patient education.
Alongside her HMR practice, Deb is a credentialed diabetes educator supervising allied health students virtually through the University of Western Australia, and she runs a community of consultant pharmacists with around 4,000 members. She has been using Heidi for two and a half years.
A Home Medicine Review session can run over an hour. Patients are often on 20 to 30 medications, the conversation rarely follows a linear path, and the pharmacist is a guest in someone's home. Before Heidi, documenting that work was the part of the job Deb liked least.
"Prior to Heidi, my notes were terrible. It's that simple. I had a piece of paper or my laptop, and I'd be typing.” — Deborah Hawthorne
Sessions follow the patient rather than a set sequence, and trying to type during a visit created a physical barrier that worked against the rapport-building the role depends on.
"Having a laptop in front of me was like a physical barrier. You're bringing something into someone's home that isn't part of their home. Developing rapport is absolutely key for them to feel comfortable telling a stranger their concerns. The laptop took that away." — Deborah Hawthorne
With a clinical window of roughly 9am to 3pm — shaped around school runs and the driving time between patient homes — there was no space during the day to write up reports. That work moved to the evenings.
"Once the kids go to sleep at seven, seven thirty, I'd be actually writing my reports. Sometimes up to nine or ten o'clock, getting up at five or six to do it all again." — Deborah Hawthorne
Before Heidi, Deb estimates she was averaging around four hours of complete admin time per client: the session itself, the drive, the calls, and the report write-up. With a capped working day and a family at home, that equation left little room for anything else.
The early use was simple: Scribe running in the background during the session, capturing the conversation and structuring it into a basic format. But Deb's needs were specific to HMR work, and she started feeding back to the team. The medication table — the ability to capture spoken medication names and render them as a structured table — was a turning point.
Two and a half years in, her Heidi setup covers the full report structure: an introduction, the medication list with discrepancies flagged against the GP's records, an immunisations section, issues and recommendations, and space for the GP to write responses directly on the document. She has also been using Evidence for the past three months to bridge the gap between how she speaks with patients and what a GP needs to read.
"I work with lots of people with low health literacy, so I use plain language in the room. But that's not always suitable in a letter to a clinician. Evidence lets me take those basic recommendations — the ones I've already got the patient's okay on — and back them with proper sources, so the GP understands where I'm coming from. Making that connection between the patient and the GP, like a puzzle fitting together." — Deborah Hawthorne
"Since Heidi came into my life, I've probably cut the average patient down to two to three hours. That's twenty-five to fifty percent of time saving for me, which means I can fit an extra one to two patients in a day just through the admin time alone." — Deborah Hawthorne
The most immediate change was practical. Reports that used to spill into the evenings now get written during the clinical day. Deb's 9-to-3 window now includes the documentation too.
With Heidi running quietly on her phone or using remote rather than a laptop on the table, the physical barrier is gone. Deb can face the patient, read their body language, and follow the conversation wherever it goes.
"Having Heidi on a remote means it's really discreet. I can give a hundred percent of my attention to the person. Being fully present, I'm able to react to their body language, their cues." — Deborah Hawthorne
The quality of the notes improved alongside the quality of the session. Progress notes are now detailed enough to be useful at follow-up, with context Deb can actually recall and build on.
"I can go back and understand what I was thinking when I saw the person last time, which I couldn't do with my old note-taking system." — Deborah Hawthorne
Deb is direct about what the biggest benefit has been. While she is able to see more patients, the time back with her family is what really matters to her.
"The greatest benefit Heidi has given me is giving me that time back to spend with my family. When you're giving so much of yourself to your clients, you want to come home and just be present with the kids. They're only little once. I don't want to miss a second of it." — Deborah Hawthorne
At the national Consultant Pharmacist conference on the Gold Coast, Deb found herself fielding questions about Heidi from peers curious about her setup. Pulling out her phone between sessions to show them how she uses it. Interest is there, she says. What pharmacists need is to see it working in practice.
"Pharmacists are trained to be black and white. AI can feel like the grey. But the scope of our practice is increasing and our jobs haven't gotten any easier. Give it a go when you're not under pressure. Even just the Scribe part, in a normal session. See how it fits. I just know it will give you that time back." — Deborah Hawthorne
For her own practice, the combination of Scribe and Evidence now covers the full clinical documentation workflow. With her templates built and the platform having learned her voice and medication vocabulary over two and a half years, the setup works the way she needs it to. She plans to keep advocating for its use across the consultant pharmacist community.
