David Cooper has been a GP partner at Old Machar Medical Practice for 24 years. He's also a senior lecturer at Aberdeen University, sits on national primary care IT groups, and chairs a local EMIS users group. Technology decisions in Scottish general practice rarely happen without him weighing in, so when he says Heidi has changed how his practice works, it carries weight.
Old Machar is a training practice. GP trainees rotate through, and the team includes nurses, physios and pharmacists alongside the GPs. Two years on from adopting Heidi, David describes it as the tool his partners can't separate themselves from.
Two hours back, every day
The headline number is simple. Across roughly 40 patient visits a day, Old Machar's clinicians are each saving one to two hours. That's not time trimmed at the edges. It's a genuine shift in the shape of the working day.
Much of that comes from referrals. Heidi drafts them during the visit itself, so GPs can copy and paste directly rather than writing them up afterwards or handing them to a secretary. The effect has rippled through the whole practice: when two secretaries retired, Old Machar didn't need to replace them. The workload that used to sit with those roles had already shifted.
What changes in the room
The time saved is only part of the story. David points to changes that show up in the visit itself:
- Notes are longer and more thorough, because clinicians spend far less time looking at a keyboard.
- GPs make more eye contact with patients. The screen stops being the thing in the middle of the room.
- Trainees, freed from typing, can put their full attention on the consultation skills they're there to learn rather than splitting focus with note-taking.
- The Tasks feature has replaced the Post-it notes that used to cover monitors across the practice, giving the team one place to track follow-ups instead of a dozen scattered ones.
Adoption has looked different by role. Secretaries now rely on it heavily for dictation and nurses use it more intermittently. Among the GP partners and every trainee who has come through the practice, uptake has been near total.
What it means for the team
Two years on, David talks about Heidi less as a piece of software the practice uses and more as part of how the practice now works. The GP partners are, in his words, unable to separate themselves from it. Every trainee who has come through Old Machar has taken to it with almost no friction, learning consultation skills in a room where the laptop isn't competing for attention. Secretaries who once spent hours transcribing now dictate directly and move on to the next thing. Even the two roles that retired didn't need replacing, because the work itself had changed shape.
That's a meaningful shift for a practice that trains the next generation of GPs and has spent two decades doing things a certain way. David is unequivocal that this isn't about replacing anyone: "Absolutely not." What Heidi has done, in his view, is give the team back the time and headspace that documentation used to take from them, and let them spend it on the parts of the job that brought them into general practice in the first place.
What's next
Having built real trust in Heidi through day-to-day documentation, Old Machar is now looking at what else the platform can do for them. David and the team are keen to explore Heidi's Evidence capability next, bringing clinical decision support into the same workflow that's already reshaped their day.
