Field Marketing, Canada•September 4, 2026•7 min read••
Kamloops Surgical Centre x Heidi at a glance
Organization: Kamloops Surgical Centre, the only private surgical centre in Kamloops, BC. Fully accredited and owned by a group of physicians.
Caseload: Two operating rooms. One dedicated to a high-volume cataract program, one running a mix of orthopaedic, general, dental and plastic surgery.
The problem: A long-time transcriptionist retired with three months' notice, leaving operative reports for up to 30 physicians with no one to type them.
Time to implement: Ninety minutes of technical setup, one week of side-by-side testing.
Results: Daily transcription time down from four hours to 20 minutes. 80% of operative reports need no edits. Roughly $20,000 CAD a year in avoided staffing costs.
Most private surgical centres are owned by one or two physicians who also run the business. Kamloops Surgical Centre, the only private surgical centre in Kamloops, is owned by a large group of shareholders.. That's why the role of Angela Hapke, the centre's Chief Executive Officer, exists. "I make the business invisible so clinicians can do what they do best," she says.
The centre sits outside BC's public health system but holds large contracts with it through Interior Health, taking on surgeries when the local hospital is at capacity. Alongside that public contract work, the centre handles WorkSafeBC and RCMP cases, cosmetic surgery and, more recently, private-pay patients travelling in from other provinces.
Every one of those surgeries produces an operative report. And for years, one external transcriptionist typed them all.
Three months' notice
When the transcriptionist announced her retirement, the centre was left with just three months to find a replacement.
Ashley, an administrative assistant with some transcription training, stepped in to keep the reports moving. It worked, but at a cost. Ashley was spending close to four hours a day transcribing dictations for up to 30 different physicians, each with a different voice and pace. The workload competed directly with her actual job: running the admin side of the centre's busiest program, cataracts. Reports to the hospital started falling behind.
Angela's options were narrowing to one: hire additional admin support, at an estimated $20,000 CAD a year, to cover a task that added no surgical capacity to the centre.
Then she heard about Heidi.
"Just try and break it"
Angela didn't book a demo. She opened a free trial and started building.
The hands-on part was small. She pulled Ashley in to play with the platform for half an hour, then spent about another hour on her own building a custom operative report template matched closely to the format the centre had always used. Roughly ninety minutes of setup in total. Then she handed it over with one instruction: "Just try and break it."
Ashley came back almost immediately. "We uploaded that first dictation file, saw what it did, and Ashley and I just looked at each other," Angela says. "It was almost a little like, 'really? This is how easy this is going to be?'"
That first comparison was convincing enough to switch on the spot. They didn't. This is surgery, and patient safety comes first, so Angela set a threshold: Ashley would keep transcribing manually, run the same audio files through Heidi, and compare the two line by line across many reports before anything changed. Over a week of testing, the results held, strongest on the centre's most common procedures. As Ashley put it: "If it's a knee scope, it's just as good as what I'm going to do."
Partway through testing, Abby on the Heidi team helped refine the templates and showed Angela what else the operative report could feed, including personalized post-op discharge documents for patients.
Total time from first login to full rollout: about a week. Time spent building: about an hour and a half.
What stood out
Asked what impressed her most, Angela doesn't name a single feature. "It was the whole thing," she says. The shock of that first upload, and how frictionless the change turned out to be.
Two things have earned a permanent place, though. The first is templates. The operative report template Angela built on day one is still roughly 90% of what runs today, with only small tweaks since. It holds its structure across a wide mix of specialties and the dictation styles of up to 30 physicians. The second is the personalized post-op discharge document Abby demonstrated during testing, generated straight from the operative report. It hasn't rolled out yet, but it's the capability Angela keeps coming back to when she talks about what the centre does next.
Nothing changed for the surgeons
Angela scoped this deliberately. The bottleneck was administrative, so the fix stayed administrative, and the part she values most is what didn't happen.
Her surgeons still dictate exactly as they always have, dropping audio files into a shared folder after each procedure. The only technical change was a file format setting adjusted once in the background. Ashley now uploads those files to Heidi instead of typing them out, gives each report a listen-through, and sends it on. Every report carries a clear disclaimer that it was transcribed by AI, in a format so close to the original that the receiving hospital's workflow was unaffected.
"It was one of the most frictionless changes I've seen in my career."
Angela Hapke
Chief Executive Officer at Kamloops Surgical Centre
The results
In the first two months, the numbers are simple. Ashley's four hours a day of transcription is now 20 minutes. 80% of the reports need no edits at all. The backlog of reports to the hospital is gone, and turnaround is faster than it was before the transcriptionist retired. The extra hire Angela was budgeting for never happened, keeping roughly $20,000 CAD a year inside the business.
The less visible result matters just as much. Ashley is back on the cataract program full time, and it shows. Chart checks and schedule changes move faster, which means the centre's highest-volume program runs proactively instead of reactively.
Would Ashley give it back? "You'd be pulling it out of her cold dead hands," Angela laughs.
What's next
Angela is already planning the next step. The centre has created a combined pre-surgical screening and post-op follow-up role, and once the nurse in that seat is fully trained, Heidi will support her documentation too. After that, Angela sees personalized patient discharge summaries as a natural fit for a private centre that competes on experience, with anesthesia and nursing documentation in the OR as a longer-term ambition.
For now, the operative reports go out on time and the surgeons haven't had to change a thing.
Kamloops Surgical Centre has been using Heidi since July 2026.
