An hour back a day, and the peace of mind that comes with it: Heidi Remote in psychiatry
Heidi Team
20 October 2026•6 min read•
Dr Ehya Uddin x Heidi at a glance
"It integrates so easily into my pre-existing workflow, it doesn't impede in any way, and it reduces the cognitive burden of having to retain all the data and information." — Dr Ehya Uddin, Consultant Psychiatrist
Key outcomes
About an hour saved every day, now reinvested in seeing more patients
Full mobility across consultation, TMS and neurofeedback rooms, with no laptop or charger to carry
Reliable audio pickup up to three metres, with no session lost to distance
Phone and telehealth calls recorded independently of the device running the call
Read on if you might also be experiencing
Typing notes mid-session at the cost of eye contact
Carrying a laptop charger between consultation rooms
Reconstructing a 90-minute session from memory before you can write it up
Losing focus on the patient in front of you while still holding the last one in your head
Background
Dr Ehya Uddin is an Australian-trained Consultant Psychiatrist (FRANZCP) with subspecialty training in child and adolescent psychiatry (Cert. Child Adol. Psych.). He treats patients across the full lifespan in private practice at Thompson Brain and Mind Hub on the Sunshine Coast, where they offer frontier treatments including MRI-guided transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) and neurofeedback.
He first used Heidi during its original AI pilot at a public hospital in Queensland, where he championed its implementation as part of the pilot group. On the side, he creates mental health and health-tech content on .
In mental health, eye contact builds rapport, and for Dr Uddin it also forms part of the assessment. A core tool in psychiatry is the mental state examination, which covers a patient’s appearance, behaviour, mood, affect, speech, and thought form and content among other domains. He needs to see how a patient moves and holds eye contact, how they’re groomed and dressed, and whether they respond to noises or voices. Each of those depends on watching the patient closely, which put Dr Uddin in a bind: the note had to get written somehow, but so did the observation.
Typing through the session, and the charger that came with it
Before Heidi, Dr Uddin brought a laptop into every session and learned to type dot points while keeping his eyes on the patient, which he admits isn’t easy. After each session he spent roughly 30 minutes turning those dot points into full notes. The laptop brought its own friction too. Its battery lasted only one to two hours, so he carried a charger and cable on top of everything else.
Ninety-minute sessions, then the recall
New adolescent presentations routinely ran close to 90 minutes, split between parent and patient. All of that had to be held in his head and reconstructed afterwards, on top of whatever came next in a full day of back-to-back sessions.
Solution
Before Remote, Dr Uddin ran Heidi off his laptop with a portable conference speaker in the room. Once he moved into full-time private practice, he switched to wearing Remote all day, and it's been on him ever since, across every room and every kind of session. The stakes on that first session were real, since trusting the device alone meant risking an entire session's notes if it failed to pick up the consult. It held, and Remote has been on him all day, every day, since.
"My first thought was, oh my gosh, I hope this works, genuinely… It did. It blew my mind." — Dr Uddin
From the door, not just the desk
Wearing Remote all day means it's already running before the session officially starts, and keeps running after it ends, capturing the moment a patient is greeted at the door through to the moment they leave.
"There's some really important information that clients give you just as they're leaving. It's less stressful for them, I think, when they've left the consult, it's all kind of done." — Dr Uddin
Patients often say something genuinely useful, or simply more relaxed, once the formal part of the session is behind them. Capturing that window means it isn't lost.
Independent of the call itself
For phone and telehealth sessions, Remote adds its own advantage: it records independently of whatever device is running the call, after getting the patient's consent, so there's no juggling one device for two jobs. He's had no session drop out from distance either, estimating a reliable range of two to three metres as he moves around a room, further proof that Remote holds up wherever he takes it.
Impact
"Because I did save time doing notes, I'm just seeing more patients now." — Dr Uddin
An hour back a day
The most immediate change is capacity. Remote supports about an hour of documentation a day for Dr Uddin, and he spends that hour on two things. He sees more patients, which the practice is happy with, and he now leaves work on time.
“With the extra time saved, I get to see more patients and also now leave work on time.” — Dr Uddin
Peace of mind
"I don't have to carry the psychological burden of retaining the information until the time where I write my notes." — Dr Uddin
He points to detailed medication plans as the clearest example, a multi-week titration schedule adjusted week by week, which he no longer needs to hold in his memory. Once it's captured, he describes the feeling as reassurance, confident the plan will be there exactly as he set it out.
Cognitive load and burnout
"I can genuinely call it a cognitive load and burden that's reduced. There is an additional domain to it as well of not having to carry it around in your mind." — Dr Uddin
For Dr Uddin, this sits apart from the time-saving figure. Because Remote is on him the whole day, not switched on and off room by room, seeing patients back to back no longer means holding each case in his head until he can write it up, or carrying it around in his mind between one patient and the next.
What's next
Dr Uddin frames the current moment in note-taking as nothing short of a revolution, or at the very least a meaningful evolution, and expects the technology to keep moving toward being always with the clinician rather than a tool picked up and put down. His own wishlist is deeper integration into the systems around a session, from imaging and pathology requests to medication charts and Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme (PBS) authority scripts, the kind of multi-system admin he says currently eats real time on its own.
His message to a clinician still on the fence is straightforward: it fits into the workflow he already had, doesn't get in the way, and is worth the investment for both himself and his patients.
