A flood of paperwork waiting before your first patient arrives
Two hours of charting a day, minimum, on top of a full clinic schedule
Documentation standards that demand complete, polished notes with no time set aside to write them
Wanting control of every word, and waiting in the wings while others trial the tools first
Government forms and referral letters that take as long as the visit itself
Meet Allan Lai
Allan Lai is a nurse practitioner in family practice with Interior Health in Kamloops, British Columbia. He spent 15 years as a registered nurse at Vancouver General Hospital, working in emergency and acute care, before completing his master's degree in 2022 and returning to practice in his hometown. Today, he has full clinic days including same day visits as well as long-term care visits, and teaches AI adoption to other nurse practitioners across BC through the NNPBC Mobile Skills Program.
For Allan, the move from emergency nursing to primary care came down to understanding his own why.
“I just like to innovate stuff. I like change. And it just so happens that change manifests itself in family practice.” — Allan Lai, NP
The Challenge: Comprehensive notes, and no time to write them
“There's a flood of paperwork in the mornings, so I've got to sort through it.” — Allan Lai, NP
Allan's documentation load started before his first patient arrived and followed him through the day. With a full schedule and BC's comprehensive NP documentation standards to meet, every note needed to be complete, well-structured and polished. Before Heidi, charting ate a minimum of two hours of his day.
And while he liked the idea of an AI scribe, Allan is deliberate about what he brings into his practice.
“The latest, greatest trial is going to take ten years in medicine and nursing. I was sitting and waiting on the wings to see how other folks were adopting it." — Allan Lai, NP
The turning point came when Interior Health ran its AI scribe trial. Colleagues started using Heidi, the kinks got ironed out in front of him, and Allan asked a friend to connect him with the Heidi team.
“I'm sold. It's a game changer.” — Allan Lai, NP
The Solution: A hybrid workflow built around control
What makes Allan's story distinct is how he uses Heidi. Rather than ambient transcription during the visit, he sees the patient with no device at all, then dictates the note into Heidi in his own words once the patient leaves. He calls it his hybrid mode.
"I like control, and my biggest fear is that at 4 o'clock when my brain is tired, I'm not going to be as sharp when I reread my note. It probably won't happen at 9 o'clock. It's the 4:30, the 5 o'clock visit." — Allan Lai, NP
Heidi handles the rest.
"It's the fact that it does a lot of the scribe stuff for you. Grammar, spelling, punctuation, formatting the note. That type of stuff just takes too much time." — Allan Lai, NP
After refining his setup, the output rarely needs a second pass:
"My notes are so tight." — Allan Lai, NP
The same workflow now carries him beyond the note. At the bottom of an encounter, he asks Heidi for a maximum three-line referral summary: the request, the relevant context, the physical findings. And for government paperwork, he'd even built his own workaround for the Disability Tax Credit, pasting each question into Ask Heidi and having it pull the answers from the visit.
"In a perfect world, I'd love to be able to just drop the government PDF into Heidi and be like, I need you to take the context of this note and fill out the disability tax credit. That would make my dream come true." — Allan Lai, NP
On a call with the Heidi team, he learned the official DTC template was already built in, ready to populate from the note. And when he flagged the BC Persons with Disabilities form as the next one he needed, it went into the template queue that same week.
The Impact: 67% less charting, half the fatigue
Allan didn't just feel the difference. He ran his own quality improvement project on his Heidi use, tracking both his charting time and his end-of-day cognitive fatigue.
"It's actually reduced my charting time by 67%." — Allan Lai, NP
From a baseline of at least two hours of charting a day, that's more than 80 minutes returned to Allan every working day — or roughly seven hours a week.
The cognitive load followed the same curve.
"Before Heidi, I was about a four, and with Heidi, I'm about a two. So it's a reduction of 50%. I would say that's tremendous." — Allan Lai, NP
For someone seeing a full day of patients with a wide range of conditions, that's not just a nicer evening. That's a different job.
What’s next
Allan now teaches AI adoption to other nurse practitioners through the NNPBC Mobile Skills Program, helping colleagues across BC find their own version of what he found: a workflow that fits how they actually practice.
Which might be the real story here. Heidi didn't ask Allan to change how he works. It gave a careful, exacting clinician his two hours back and left him fully in charge of every word.
