Heidi Team
"I save almost an hour and a half every day." — Dr Mythili Pandi, family physician and international board certified lactation consultant (IBCLC)
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MATTER is a health optimisation space in Singapore. A fully licensed medical clinic sits alongside tech-enabled recovery services, saunas, cold plunge, red light therapy and hyperbaric oxygen therapy, with personal training and health coaching in the same building. The premise is that most people now live long and spend the last stretch of it in poor health, and that the work of changing that starts well before anything goes wrong.
Health coaching is newer in Singapore than in Australia, the UK or the US, so MATTER spends real effort explaining what a health coach does. Care is fragmented. A client sees a GP for one thing, a specialist for another, a personal trainer, a naturopath, and nobody is looking at the whole picture. The coach is the person who does, working alongside the doctors to turn it into a single plan for whatever season of life that client is in.
We spoke to Dr Shireen Henry, who qualified as a medical doctor in South Africa and works as health coach and head of clinical operations at MATTER; Dr Mythili Pandi, family physician and IBCLC, who also directs a prenatal and postpartum lactation centre; and Dr Dheeraj Khiatani, general practitioner.
Longer sessions produce better care and more documentation. All three described the same squeeze from a different angle.
"As I talk with my patients I get the relevant information, and a lot of it is stored in my head. I've always struggled to find the time to input everything at the end of a session, so I'd consolidate it all and write the notes at the end of the day, which takes time away from my family and from doing the things I love." — Dr Mythili Pandi
Her lactation sessions run a full hour. Feeding history, weight before the feed, weight after it, everything already tried. She remembers every detail of it, vividly. That was never the problem.
The problem was that the writing up had to happen somewhere, and without a 15-minute gap between patients, it happened at night.
"It's difficult to give the patient your full focus when they're telling their story and trying to capture all the relevant details at the same time, while making sure your note-taking is accurate." — Dr Dheeraj Khiatani
Dr Khiatani was one of those doctors who typed while the patient spoke. In longer preventive health sessions that trade-off gets sharper, because the story is the clinical value.
Dr Henry described it from the other chair. An average typist by her own account, she had defaulted to pen and paper for years, partly because writing helped her retain the detail. Clients could still tell.
"When clients come in to consult with you, they want to be heard and they want to feel like you're giving them your undivided attention. When you're writing or typing, you're simply not able to give that." — Dr Shireen Henry
Years of typing through sessions had built Dr Khiatani a set of shortcuts, and the shortcuts cost him detail he had actually delivered. A parent leaving with a feverish child would be talked through the red flags to watch for and what should bring them back. The note said "red flag advice given".
Dr Henry, who brings a doctor's structure to her coaching notes and keeps clients' own words in quotation marks, put the stakes plainly.
"Your notes matter. If it's not written there, it doesn't exist. If somebody comes back to query it, whatever isn't there doesn't exist in a court of law." — Dr Shireen Henry
Dr Henry had used general transcription tools before, for meetings, and they weren't built for this. What made Heidi different was that it held clinical language and the client's own phrasing at the same time, and put both into a health coaching context rather than flattening them.
She didn't take that on trust. For the first stretch she ran both systems in parallel, writing her own notes alongside Heidi's output to see whether the two matched. They did.
"I'm now able to fully concentrate on what the individual in front of me is saying, and it makes the session a lot more engaging, because I don't have to worry about making notes." — Dr Shireen Henry
Dr Khiatani noticed the same shift in how he came across.
"Heidi has allowed me to just focus and look at the patient, and be responsive to what they're saying rather than typing. I think that makes me come across as more personable." — Dr Dheeraj Khiatani
Each of them shaped the output to their own standard. Dr Henry's templates pull verbatim client quotes into a structure she recognises from clinical practice. Dr Mythili presents the detail exactly the way she wants it read back. Dr Khiatani started from a template another Heidi user had shared in the community and adapted it from there.
MATTER's favourite ways of using Heidi:
"It would take down all the relevant things I said, which gives me much more comprehensive note-taking. That's really important for good medical practice, and from a medico-legal standpoint it's vital to document everything." — Dr Dheeraj Khiatani
The red flag advice is in the record now, in the words he used to give it. For a practice built on long, detail-heavy sessions, that shift from shorthand to full documentation carries well past convenience.
Dr Mythili’s other worry came out fine too. Between French patients, Chinese-speaking patients and thick regional accents, she expected trouble and didn't find it.
"Even if people speak with a different accent, it does capture quite nicely." — Dr Mythili Pandi
Dr Henry had the same experience, sometimes from further behind. She has sat in sessions struggling to make out a heavily accented client and found Heidi had it down correctly.
Dr Mythili’s hour and a half a day comes mostly from the lactation work rather than her quicker MATTER sessions. She had to sit down and decide what to do with it.
"Baking, hanging out with the dogs, hanging out with the kids when they want to hang out with me." — Dr Mythili Pandi
For Dr Henry the gain isn't only the hours. It's that the hours land in a field moving fast enough that keeping up is its own job.
"When you're working with Heidi you win on two fronts. You've got access to the evidence at hand during the session, so you can query it in real time. And with that extra time freed up, it opens a window where you can start doing your own learning in areas you're interested in." — Dr Shireen Henry
Live translation is the feature Dr Khiatani wants most. He sees Chinese-speaking patients on A&E shifts and currently runs the conversation through a translation app, listening, typing, translating back. A department-issued translation device didn't help much either, slow and not accurate enough to trust. Heidi is building real-time medical translation now.
He'd also like Heidi connected to the electronic medical record (EMR), so a medication list carries across without retyping, weight-based dosing for a child calculates itself, and a set of blood tests comes through as an order set rather than a list to key in.
"We all love it. We're all Heidi fans." — Dr Shireen Henry
Giulia Pedrazzini
Heidi Team
Dr Annie Liau Fui Vun
Consultant Paediatrician
Heidi Team