How Heidi Remote integrates seamlessly into clinician’s workflow
“It travels with me: down the hall to the patient's room, or to the dining room table where we have important conversations with family. I don't have to remember to bring my phone and put it on the table." – Dr. Paul Hacker, Community Palliative Care Physician, Ottawa
Key outcomes:
- Hands-free, on-body documentation across home, hospice and aged care visits
- Removes the silent mid-visit microphone dropouts common to phone-based scribing
- Local session storage keeps documentation intact in low-signal environments: rural homes, aging buildings, old hospitals and nursing homes
- Built for clinical workflows, not adapted from consumer hardware: antibacterial surface, 14-hour battery, single-button operation
Read on if you might also be experiencing:
- Documenting visits away from a desk — home, hospice, aged care, rural practice
- Cellular coverage that drops or stalls partway through a patient visit
- Phone-based scribing that loses audio mid-session without warning
- Bringing a personal device into the room during sensitive family conversations
Background
Paul has practiced community-based palliative care in Ottawa since 2010. He leads Community Palliative Medicine Associates, and his “clinic” is wherever a patient happens to be — a kitchen table, a hospice bedside, a living room at the end of a long drive. He started using Heidi for documentation last summer. The software side of the work got better the day he turned it on.
The hardware side did not. Until Heidi Remote came along.
What phones kept getting wrong
Cellular coverage inside patients’ homes is variable. Placing a phone on a bedside table to catch a conversation feels intrusive and the failure mode Paul ran into most often was the quiet one. The phone would silently drop the microphone connection mid-visit. He’d only discover it afterward, when he came back to a visit with a full conversation missing from the record.
For community palliative care, that’s the conversation that matters most. Families in the room. Decisions about the last weeks of a life. “Good enough, most of the time” is the wrong reliability bar for the work needed to be done.
Why Remote changes the bar
Heidi Remote is a small wearable the clinician turns on and forgets about. Paul clips it to his clothing in the morning, presses the button when a visit starts, and carries on. The device transcribes the session and syncs into Heidi.
For him, the quiet win is that it just travels with him. Down the hall to a patient's room. Over to the dining room table where the hard conversations with family actually happen. Nothing to remember to bring, nothing to remember to place on the table — the device is already there.
Connectivity is the other half of the story, and it matters differently depending on where you practice. In Paul's urban Ottawa work, poor signal is rare but not unheard of. For clinicians doing rural home visits or working in aging buildings, old hospitals and nursing homes, it's a daily reality. When the network isn't cooperating, Remote stores the session locally and syncs when connection returns. The transcription is intact either way.
The physical fit matches the work too: 21 grams, an antibacterial surface that wipes down between patients, a magnetic clip that stays put, and a single button with LED confirmation. It is, as Paul puts it, clearly designed with clinical workflows in mind rather than adapted from consumer hardware.
What changed for his practice
- Documentation no longer depends on cellular coverage at each home.
- No more silent mid-visit dropouts discovered at the end of a round.
- The phone goes back to being a phone — not the single point of failure for the record.
- Less equipment on the bedside table; more attention on the patient and family.
Who Remote is built for
Heidi Remote was built for clinicians on the go, to ensure that all documentation goes where the visit goes.
Similar to Dr. Paul Hacker, we’ve built Remote to be suited for community palliative care, aged care, rural practice, home visits, emergency, nursing teams; the specialties where care has always happened away from a desk. The places where a phone alone was never quite the right tool.
