Fifty patients a day: how Dr Alvin keeps his notes detailed
Heidi Team
20 August 2026•6 min read•
Dr Alvin x Heidi at a glance
"I think everyone should try it." — Dr Alvin, Paediatrician
Key outcomes:
Notes written during the visit instead of after the last of ~50 patients has gone home
English, Mandarin, Cantonese and Malay held in one coherent note, including when the language switches mid-session
School letters, absenteeism letters, hospital summaries and referrals produced in a click, without grammar mistakes
Clinical questions answered in seconds at the point of decision, rather than after the session
Read on if you might also be experiencing:
Notes left until the whole clinic session is over, then written from memory
A patient list too long to leave any gap between one visit and the next
Rooms where the conversation moves between languages and dialects
Letters to schools, parents and hospitals stacking up behind the clinical work
Background
Dr Alvin is a paediatrician running an outpatient clinic in Malaysia, with no inpatient list. He sees around 50 children a day.
Paediatrics also carries its own paperwork load, and most of it is written for someone other than the doctor. Every case can generate a letter to a school, a note for absenteeism, a letter so a parent can work from home, a referral, or a summary to hospital.
The room is multilingual by default. English, Mandarin, Cantonese and Malay all appear, often inside a single visit.
Challenges
The notes waited for the end of the day
Dr Alvin made a deliberate choice not to type in front of families. The cost of that choice landed after the last patient.
"I have a very quite busy clinic schedule. So usually I would just listen through what the patients say. And subsequently after the whole clinic session only, I will start typing my notes." — Dr Alvin
There was no gap in the day to catch up in either. "In between patients, I don't really have time to really sit down and type my notes."
Detail lost between the room and the keyboard
Fifty visits is more than anyone can hold in full, and writing from memory means writing less than happened.
"That actually gives a downside whereby sometimes I might forget some of the important points, or I can't really write down most, I mean, in detail, most of the clinic consultation notes." — Dr Alvin
A room that moves between languages
Before he'd trust an AI scribe, Dr Alvin had one question, and it's the question every clinician in the region asks first.
"Our patients are multilingual. Our local English might be Manglish, you know, with a mixture of Malay, Chinese, Cantonese. Based on the European and US, they are all speaking English, right. That's actually sparked my biggest question mark." — Dr Alvin
Solution
Dr Alvin first came across Heidi at a talk on AI in paediatric practice. He photographed the slide from his seat, looked up the website that night and started on the free version.
His workflow is two buttons. He starts Heidi at the beginning of the visit, ends it at the close, moves to the next child, and reviews the notes at the end of the day.
"Heidi does help to reduce the time in the sense that I just need to click on start and end button. And I can go through all the patients at the end of the day, I can slowly go through the notes and then correct and just rephrase it on certain things that is not correct." — Dr Alvin
He set his languages to English, Chinese and Cantonese, then watched what happened when the conversation went somewhere else.
"Surprisingly with Malay patients, it's still captured nicely in terms of language translation and there's no problem. And when we do interchange language during consultation, it just flow very well in terms of the notes as well." — Dr Alvin
The letters were the second surprise. Paperwork he'd otherwise have to draft from scratch now arrives finished in one click.
"In just a click, it just produced wonderful, concise, comprehensive, without any grammar mistakes." — Dr Alvin
Referral letters in particular reset his standard for what a good one reads like.
"It's so beautifully written. It's just very concise and beautifully written. If I'm the receiving and I read the letter, I'll be like, it's a great letter. Concise and detailed." — Dr Alvin
He also uses Heidi at the point in a visit where the path forks.
"I do use it as an adjunct to help my clinical decisions sometimes when you come into crossroad, like whether to start on certain medications, or what's the latest guidelines on certain management. Then it actually gives me better ideas. In the next few seconds I can get the important notes of the diseases or the management of certain illnesses." — Dr Alvin
Impact
"For myself, the most impact will be the quality of the notes. It's more detailed, it's more comprehensive. Things like I have actually mentioned, sometimes I can't remember what I mentioned to the patient, actually it's already picked out by Heidi, which is very impressive." — Dr Alvin
Second is his attention during the visit. "I don't need to really jot down things or type on certain important points. I can just fully concentrate on doing my consultation."
What he didn't expect was how little of it behaved like dictation.
"It's actually out of my expectation. I thought that it would just be a manual kind of like dictation kind of transcribe. But at the end it turned out to be something like a human brain working behind. They can construct, they can reorganise, they really know medicine. It's a medical app that actually runs what the clinician would phrase a thing, or how the clinician thinks." — Dr Alvin
What's next
Dr Alvin's asks are regional and specific. He wants the language handling tuned further to how Southeast Asia actually speaks, dialects included.
"If there is a way that they can do it more suitable to our lingo and our accent, that would be better. In Malaysia, even in between Chinese, we speak different dialects." — Dr Alvin
He hasn't built his own templates yet, switching between Heidi's instead to see how each case lays out. That's the next thing on his list.
