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.
