Gastrocare4U x Heidi at a glance
"Heidi has quietly raised the floor of what my documentation looks like on my busiest days. On a busy day, that floor matters more than the ceiling." — Dr Alex Leow, Consultant Gastroenterologist and Hepatologist
Key outcomes:
- Around 13 hours of after-hours admin reclaimed every week: more than 1,000 hours cumulatively, across 4,135 sessions since November 2024
- 5,191 clinical documents generated: 4,508 notes plus 683 supporting documents, all from inside the clinic day
- 1,749 hours of multilingual audio transcribed: English, Mandarin, Cantonese, Bahasa Melayu and Bahasa Indonesia, often code-switched within a single session
- Documentation patients call distinctly better than what they get elsewhere: clear, structured, in their preferred language
Read on if you might also be experiencing:
- The constant trade-off between being present with the patient and producing complete documentation
- Patients switching across multiple languages within a single appointment
- 15 to 20 minutes per consultation summary spilling into evenings and weekends
- Reconstructing patient histories from memory hours after the session
Background
Gastrocare4U is a private gastroenterology and hepatology practice based at Pantai Hospital Kuala Lumpur, led by Dr Alex Leow. Sessions routinely cross English, Mandarin, Cantonese, Bahasa Melayu and Bahasa Indonesia, often within the same appointment.
In a specialty built on careful history-taking and precise written communication, referral letters, consultation summaries and daycare discharge reports after endoscopy aren't optional extras. They're the standard of care.
Challenges
The impossible trade-off
"The frustration wasn't one big thing, it was the constant trade-off between being present with the patient in front of me and producing the quality of documentation my referring doctors and patients deserved." — Dr Alex Leow
Fully engaging with a patient meant gaps to reconstruct later. Capturing history in real time meant a clinician typing rather than listening. Patients feel that difference.
Documentation as an after-hours burden
Every session generated a referral letter or consultation summary. These documents needed to be clinically precise and often produced in the patient's preferred language. Not something that can be rushed.
"A single detailed consultation summary could take 15 to 20 minutes to draft properly, and across a full clinic that compounded into hours of after-hours work." — Dr Alex Leow
The cost wasn't only the hours. It was carrying the unfinished day home.
Solution
Dr Leow evaluated several clinical scribe platforms before settling on Heidi. He needed three things: multilingual support that actually worked, deep template customisation, and pricing that made sense for a private specialist practice.
"Even though Heidi's transcription process isn't necessarily the fastest on the market, it clearly edged out the alternatives on the features that matter most in my practice: robust multilingual support and deep template customisation for scribe output." — Dr Alex Leow
A multilingual room, captured in full
Language at a Malaysian specialist clinic isn't simple. Patients code-switch mid-sentence, beginning a history in Mandarin, slipping into Cantonese for family medical history, switching to English for medication names. This isn't unusual. It's the norm.
"Heidi handles this seamlessly. It doesn't just detect multiple languages, it handles multiple languages used interchangeably within the same session. That's a genuinely hard technical problem, and no other scribe I tested came close." — Dr Alex Leow
Since November 2024, close to 1,750 hours of multilingual audio have moved through the workflow without language being lost in translation.
Templates built to the clinic's standard
Rather than fit his documentation into a rigid format, Dr Leow built templates that capture what his clinic actually needs, including session timestamps and the languages used.
"Knowing that a particular patient preferred to speak in Cantonese or Mandarin means that on follow-up I can greet them and open the conversation in their native language. It's a small personal touch that patients genuinely appreciate, and Heidi makes it effortless to capture and retrieve." — Dr Alex Leow
His three most-used templates:
- Clinic consultation and follow-up summary: the standard write-up for each session
- Daycare discharge summary post-endoscopy: structured handover after the procedure
- EMR-ready clinical note: clean output ready to drop into the hospital record
Across 4,135 Heidi sessions, those templates have produced more than 5,000 finished clinical documents.
Impact
"I'm no longer reconstructing histories from memory hours later. The documentation reflects what actually happened in the room." — Dr Alex Leow
The most significant shift wasn't speed, it was assurance. Every session is now documented completely, in the room, in the patient's language. The reconstruction work is gone.
At 15 minutes reclaimed per consultation summary, 4,135 Heidi sessions add up to more than 1,000 hours of after-hours work returned to the clinic day. Across the 18 months since activation, that's around 13 hours every week. More than a full working day, every week, returned to the clinic.
With documentation handled mid-session, Dr Leow can hold eye contact, read body language and respond to emotional cues without worrying that detail is slipping through. The summaries his clinic produces are clear, structured, and delivered in the patient's preferred language. Patients can review them at home, share with family, or bring to follow-up.
"Several patients have told me the documentation they receive from our clinic is distinctly better than what they've experienced elsewhere, and that has become part of how our clinical practice and service is being perceived." — Dr Alex Leow
The clearest sign of Heidi's impact isn't a single dramatic moment. It's an accumulation of small ones. The session that flowed more naturally. The patient who left with a summary in their own language. The evening Dr Leow got home on time.
What's next
In the clinic, Dr Leow is looking to extend ambient capture into procedural documentation. Structured endoscopy and intestinal ultrasound reports. The same real-time capture, the same template-driven output, applied to procedures.
Further out, he sees strong potential in multilingual patient education, producing accurate, culturally appropriate content across the languages his patients speak.
"These tools belong at the point of care, in every language my patients speak, and across every form of clinical output I produce." — Dr Alex Leow
