Over 1 Million Minutes Transcribed at GI Alliance with Heidi Health

Background

GI Alliance, the largest gastroenterology practice in the U.S., is navigating the same pressures felt nationwide in healthcare: longer consults, increasingly complex decision-making, and heightened payer scrutiny. These forces stretch physicians’ capacity, create documentation backlogs, and expose practices to revenue loss through downcoding.

Heidi Health has partnered with GI Alliance physicians to show how AI-powered documentation can directly address these challenges. The experience of Dr. Michael Mills, a senior gastroenterologist at GI Alliance, highlights the value Heidi brings to clinicians, patients, and the financial health of practices.

The Challenge

• Time constraints on documentation: Gastroenterologists like Dr. Mills often struggled to capture the full complexity of patient conversations, leaving notes incomplete or rushed.
• Patient comprehension gaps: Patients sometimes left visits confident in their understanding, only to realize later that they had missed important parts of the discussion.
• Erosion of patient rapport: Typing during visits diverted Dr. Mills’s attention from patients, reducing eye contact and weakening the doctor-patient connection.

The Solution

GI Alliance physicians began using Heidi Health to document complex consults. For Dr. Mills, the impact was immediate. Instead of typing notes during or after visits, Heidi listens to the full conversation and generates a clinically accurate record. He now finalizes his documentation in real time, often while the patient is still in the room. The result: no more late-night backlogs.

The benefits extend beyond efficiency. Billing teams now receive documentation that reflects the true complexity of encounters, reducing the risk of downcoding. Patients can revisit their visit notes at home, reinforcing understanding and supporting follow-through on care plans. For Dr. Mills, the greatest shift has been the return of his attention to the patient in front of him.

“This is finally something that helps me document the extensive conversations I have with patients,” Dr. Mills said. “It puts me back as a doctor.”

Impact

• Workflow efficiency: Documentation that once lagged behind is now completed within minutes, keeping schedules on track and eliminating end-of-day backlogs.
• Patient understanding: One patient told Dr. Mills that reading their Heidi-generated note afterward helped them understand their treatment options better than during the visit itself.
• Billing accuracy: Since adopting Heidi, billing staff was not concerned about insufficient notes, and the risk of downcoding has dropped.
• Physician satisfaction: Freed from the keyboard, Dr. Mills now maintains eye contact and focuses on his patients, restoring the quality of the physician-patient relationship.

Conclusion

Heidi Health’s work with GI Alliance demonstrates how AI-powered documentation addresses some of the most systemic challenges in gastroenterology. By capturing the full scope of complex consults, preventing revenue loss from downcoding, and improving patient comprehension, Heidi is driving both clinical and financial outcomes.

Dr. Mills’s experience provides a clinician’s perspective on the value Heidi brings to GI Alliance: “It’s not just transcription—it’s a smart note that reflects the whole conversation.”