Heidi Team
"The thing that helps me most is the new case clerking. The need to remember what the patient said, or whether I missed the key points, that has reduced by a lot." — Dr Yee Sze-Voon, Consultant Neurosurgeon
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Dr Yee Sze-Voon is a consultant neurosurgeon at Columbia Asia Hospital Seremban in Malaysia. His work spans brain, spine and nerve conditions, from slipped discs, sciatica and spinal stenosis to brain tumours, hydrocephalus and trigeminal neuralgia, with a special interest in endoscopic and minimally invasive spine surgery.
His practice is built on clarity. A scan finding means little until it is correlated with the patient's symptoms, examination and overall clinical picture, and he believes patients deserve to understand exactly what their results mean. That clarity takes time, and in a high-volume neurosurgical clinic time is the thing in shortest supply.
Most of his patients first arrive through his outpatient clinic before admission. We spoke to Dr Yee about how Heidi has changed the way he documents a new case.
Before Heidi, Dr Yee documented the traditional way. He took the history, examined the patient, then keyed everything into the electronic medical record (EMR) afterwards, often from memory.
"Sometimes the history, we forget about it." — Dr Yee Sze-Voon
A new-patient session could run to 45 minutes, and holding all of it in his head until the typing was done was a real cognitive load. The examination findings stayed with him. The history was the part at risk, and the clinic rarely let up. With a high patient load and a short turnover, every note had to be done as fast as possible.
"I still prefer my notes to be one line, but I tend to miss out on certain things." — Dr Yee Sze-Voon
His instinct was to keep notes lean, but brevity came at a cost. The durations, the key positive findings, the key negatives, the details that matter most in neurosurgical decision-making, were the ones most likely to slip when the clinic was at full tilt.
Dr Yee first looked at simple transcription tools to lighten the load, but found them too inaccurate for clinical work. Then he found Heidi.
He has built a custom new-case clerking template shaped around his own documentation style, and keeps refining it so the output lands closer to his preferences with every tweak.
"With the custom template to my clerking preference, that helps a lot in shortening the timing." — Dr Yee Sze-Voon
The workflow is simple. Heidi transcribes the session and generates the note, and Dr Yee vets it, adds any points he wants elaborated, then copies it into the EMR. The waiting time goes too. While Heidi generates the note for one patient, he moves straight on to the next, returning to review and save the longer clerking notes between sessions.
Dr Yee's clinic runs in English, Bahasa Melayu, Mandarin and Cantonese, often within a single session. With Heidi's language setting on auto-detect, the switching takes care of itself, picking up Cantonese mid-session and handling Malaysia's mix of accents without trouble.
"I'm quite happy with the result." — Dr Yee Sze-Voon
"It saved me between five to seven minutes per case, and the complex one will go to ten minutes." — Dr Yee Sze-Voon
The numbers compound quickly. He sees five or six new patients in a clinic session, so the minutes add up fast.
The quality of the record has lifted alongside the speed. Where his one-line notes once dropped key details, the documentation is now fuller without extra typing.
"Right now it's a bit more comprehensive, and I'm still tweaking it to make sure it doesn't miss the important points." — Dr Yee Sze-Voon
The biggest benefit is the one hardest to measure: the mental load of holding a 45-minute history in his head until the typing is done. That has reduced by a lot, and the worry of missing a key point on a new case has gone with it.
Dr Yee is now working with Heidi's clinical team to refine his templates further, including a medication format that matches his own shorthand.
He is also looking forward to using Heidi Remote. Game-changing for the parts of his hospital where there is no connection and the notes will not generate. The clip-on form is more discreet on ward rounds than holding a phone in front of a patient.
