Empowering Mental Health Clinicians: Dr James Woolley's Success with Heidi

At a glance summary

Dr James Woolley x Heidi at a glance

"Heidi has cut our documentation time by up to 50%, freeing us to focus on patient care whilst reducing administrative stress." – Dr James Woolley, Consultant Psychiatrist

Key outcomes:

• Reduced documentation time by up to 50%, allowing more meaningful patient consultations
• Increased adoption through clinician-driven, customisable templates
• Enhanced capacity for urgent and unscheduled patient consultations
• Expanded use in multidisciplinary team meetings and administrative reporting

Read on if you might also be experiencing:

• Overwhelming administrative tasks impacting patient care
• Difficulty capturing nuanced conversations within rigid documentation systems
• Limited ability to manage urgent or complex patient needs effectively
• Struggles with new technology adding complexity rather than simplifying processes

Background

Dr James Woolley is a Consultant Psychiatrist and leading mental health clinician at Schoen Clinic Chelsea, a private outpatient mental health clinic in Central London. 

The clinic sees a wide variety of patients, with conditions ranging from anxiety and depression to ADHD, addictions, and bipolar disorder. With a multidisciplinary team of psychiatrists, psychologists, therapists and allied health professionals, the clinic prides itself on delivering responsive and individualised mental healthcare.

Challenges

In a busy, varied outpatient setting like Dr Woolley’s clinic, clinicians face the dual burden of high patient complexity and administrative overload.

Documentation didn’t reflect the nuance of real conversations

“Going through electronic note structures with patients in a very formulaic manner often doesn’t work very well. You’ve got to take it at the patient’s pace, with issues in the order they bring them to you.”

Mental health consultations are rarely linear. Conversations shift. Priorities surface unexpectedly. But EHRs expect predictable structure and reconciling that gap was time-consuming.

Documentation time equalled face time

“You would often be spending as much time doing all that administrative work after the appointment as you would in the face-to-face time with the patient.”

Administrative burden post-consultation was significant. The time and cognitive load impacted availability, created bottlenecks in care and long invisible working hours.

New tech often made things worse

“Amongst clinicians, there’s quite a lot of ambivalence about new IT initiatives. They often end up creating more work.”

Dr Woolley and his team were open to new tools, but cautious. Many past initiatives in the healthcare space added friction, not flow.

For a while, the team explored workarounds, tried other voice tools, and tested documentation strategies, though none created a step-change, until they came across ambient AI tools like Heidi.

Solution

The team discovered Heidi while exploring secure, GDPR-compliant ambient voice solutions with real potential for healthcare. What set Heidi apart was not just its AI capability, but its usability, configurability, and clear compliance credentials.

“We were just looking for products that had a highlighted focus on governance. Heidi was properly configured and presented in a way that gave us the assurance of fulfilling our privacy and regulatory requirements.”

They began rolling Heidi out across disciplines, from psychiatry to psychotherapy, to dietetics and quickly saw value. Templates became the foundation for seamless adoption.

“The templates are what have really engaged people the most. Once you've got a template set up, it's as minimally disruptive as possible.”

Top features they rely on:

• Customisable templates – Tailored per specialty, aligned to their “house style”
• Context field – Used intelligently to carry forward diagnoses and medications
• Post-session refinements – Using "Ask Heidi" to add sections, create referrals or personalised information sheets or emphasise specific aspects

Impact

“It took 10 minutes to do something that otherwise would have easily taken an hour.”

At a glance:

• Up to 50% reduction in documentation time for James and colleagues
• Greater adoption across clinicians through peer-led template sharing
• More time for urgent or unscheduled consults - without admin anxiety
• Use cases expanded beyond consults, including MDT meetings,insurance reporting and summary letters.

More time, less stress

“There’s less anxiety on my part. When you know it’s only going to take a few minutes afterwards to get all the admin done.”

Better notes, better structure

“You get a meaningful, well-structured assessment out of it, even when conversations meander.”

“Our favourite most-used templates are the ones for new patient assessments.”

The assessment appointments in mental health can be quite lengthy and generate a great deal of detail, which can be very time-consuming to capture. 

“This is where the greatest time-saving has been. We’re now able to squeeze additional patients in if needed in crisis situations, because we are not needing to worry quite so much about having a large chunk of admin time available in order to also complete the work. This, in turn, improves flow along with patient and clinician experience.” 

Seamless team adoption

“Once they see how it’s working for you, colleagues just pick up your template and dive in.”

Now, the majority of Dr Woolley’s team use Heidi on a daily basis, and they are looking to scale it out.

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A surprising benefit

“We’ve been experimenting with using it for purely administrative tasks. It produced a really nice summary report of 5 years’ worth of history.”

What’s next

With Heidi, Dr Woolley and his colleagues are no longer burdened by the admin waiting in the background. They’re freed up to see more patients, provide more thoughtful care, and spend more time in the moment.

Dr Woolley’s advice to fellow clinicians?

“Try it out on a family member, there’s nothing better than seeing what it generates.”