MDInc x Heidi at a glance
"I was wondering to myself, is there not a better way to do this? And now I feel there absolutely is." — Dr Joshua Gibson, Emergency Medicine Specialist and Director at MD.Inc
Key outcomes:
- 70% of notes now complete in under five minutes, up from 17% before Heidi
- 7 in 10 clinicians finish their notes during the shift, not in the unpaid hours after it
- 17,937 notes and documents produced across 1,102 hours of captured consultations, in a 90-day pilot with 25 clinicians
Read on if you might also be experiencing:
- Rebuilding a patient's history from memory once the consult is over, instead of documenting it as it happens
- A typing backlog that forms behind every patient while the next one is already waiting
- Paying clinicians extra for the hours their shift overruns because notes still need to be written
- Uncertainty about whether your notes are detailed enough for a colleague to pick up the case, or to stand behind in an audit
- A schedule capped by how fast you can document, not by how many patients you could actually see
Background
MD.Inc is a specialist emergency medicine group running three emergency centres in the Western Cape: Life Vincent Pallotti, Life Kingsbury, and Life West Coast. Amongst them, the sites see close to 4,500 patients a month, staffed by around 19 medical officers and 6 emergency medicine physicians.
Dr Tiyiselani Mabasa, an emergency medicine specialist and the co-founder of MD.Inc, had wanted a scribe for years before Heidi existed. A colleague working in internal medicine first showed him Heidi on a ward round in 2025. Dr Mabasa wasn't sure it would carry over to emergency medicine, an environment built on unpredictability rather than routine, but decided the idea was worth testing himself first.
MD.Inc's clinical leadership set four criteria before the pilot began in March 2026: cut documentation time, enable quicker patient turnover, produce notes that meet medico-legal standards, and end unpaid overtime spent finishing notes after a shift. By the end of the 90-day review, all four success criteria had been met.
Challenges
Notes rebuilt from memory, after the fact
Before Heidi, Dr Tia Essop, an emergency medicine medical officer at Life Kingsbury Hospital emergency centre, documented every consult in retrospect. She'd see the patient, then sit down afterward and reconstruct what had happened from memory.
"The constraints before Heidi had to do a lot with remembering exactly what the patient said. Before Heidi, I used to make my notes in retrospect." — Dr Tia Essop, Emergency Medicine Medical Officer at MD.Inc
A typing backlog behind every patient
Dr Joshua Gibson, an emergency medicine specialist and director of MD.Inc, described a similar bottleneck, just at higher volume. A single unpredictable morning could bring a head injury, a toddler who'd swallowed a hairpin, and a full waiting room behind them, with no time built in to write any of it up properly.
"Usually you would spend anything from 10 to 15, sometimes 20 minutes typing out notes and trying to get organised, which often meant that the notes would wait. You'd see a patient, you don't have enough time, so you rush, you see the next patient, you see the next patient." — Dr Joshua Gibson, Emergency Medicine Specialist and Director at MD.Inc
It wasn't only clinicians who noticed. Dr Mabasa had heard complaints from other specialists, and occasionally patients, about doctors spending too long in front of a screen. He'd timed himself: five minutes per note, typing as fast as he could, across 10 to 12 patients on a busy shift.
Solution
Evidence behind what's said in the room, not just a transcript
What moved Dr Essop past her own skepticism (by her own account, not an "AI person") was Heidi's evidence-based discharge summaries. Feeding in a patient's blood results returns a summary with red flags to watch for, backed by clinical evidence rather than a chatbot's best guess.
"It actually uses our clinical information because they pull out evidence-based research against it. It's not just AI not using medical evidence-based, which is actually quite nice." — Dr Tia Essop, Emergency Medicine Medical Officer at MD.Inc
Dr Gibson checks Heidi is running the moment a shift starts, as automatically as he'd check the rest of his kit.
"I use it from the get-go, the same way I check I haven't forgotten my stethoscope. I just check, okay, is my Heidi on?" — Dr Joshua Gibson, Emergency Medicine Specialist and Director at MD.Inc
Staying present, out loud
Dr Essop takes Heidi into the room and dictates as she examines a patient, narrating findings like a GCS score or an ultrasound reading as she goes. Dr Gibson found the same shift in his own consults: Heidi prompts him to vocalise what he's examining, which keeps him signposting for the patient rather than working in silence.
"Because you're describing it as you go, it really helps the patient to understand what you are actually doing. By the end of the consultation, we've been keeping each other on the same page." — Dr Joshua Gibson, Emergency Medicine Specialist and Director at MD.Inc
One shared template, built for emergency medicine
Dr Mabasa in collaboration with Heidi built a standardised template for MD.Inc's clinical team, internally referred to as "MD.Inc notes," rather than leaving every clinician to their own shorthand. Dr Essop found it flexible enough to match how she already thought through a case, prioritising differentials the way she'd order them herself.
"It's really customisable to how you'd even write your physical notes by yourself." — Dr Tia Essop, Emergency Medicine Medical Officer at MD.Inc
Getting a resistant department to actually use it
Rollout wasn't automatic, and Heidi's Customer Success team helped shape it from the start. Dr Mabasa piloted Heidi solo, then brought in three fellow specialists who paid for it individually before MD.Inc adopted it as a group. Junior doctors stayed hesitant, so Customer Success worked with the practice to structure a three-month, company-funded trial with hands-on support: onboarding sessions for the whole department, a weekly drop-in Q&A where anyone could bring Heidi-related questions, and monthly usage reviews with the project lead to spot who hadn't picked it up yet. Senior clinicians modeled Heidi during shifts, and the reviews meant support went where it was needed instead of waiting for adoption to stall.
"We told them that we're trialing it out for three months and we're putting a lot of money in it... when we're doing note checkings, we could see the doctors that are not using it, because you can see when someone is typing on their own." — Dr Tiyiselani Mabasa, Emergency Medicine Specialist and Co-Founder of MD.Inc
Impact
Under five minutes, not fifteen
Across the pilot, the share of notes completed in under five minutes rose from 17% to 70%. Clinicians' own satisfaction with their documentation process climbed from 2.9 to 4.3 out of 5, a 48% lift.
"Makes notes quicker than I can type." — Emergency Medicine Doctor, MD.Inc
An hour back on a shift
Dr Mabasa timed the difference himself. Typing a note from scratch used to take five to eight minutes. With Heidi at the bedside, it's down to two or three minutes of review and light editing, and dictating a note from memory afterward runs about the same.
"I would say on average, per consult, I was saving about five minutes. And if you translate that to about 10 to 12 patients per shift on an eight-hour shift, it was saving me an hour. So in that hour, I could easily see another two, three patients." — Dr Tiyiselani Mabasa, Emergency Medicine Specialist and Co-Founder of MD.Inc
Across a typical three to four shifts a week, that's three to four hours back and roughly 16 additional patients seen.
Notes finished before the drive home
Before Heidi, 22 of MD.Inc's 24 clinicians regularly carried documentation past the end of their shift, averaging 36 extra minutes a day. By the end of the pilot, 7 in 10 rarely or never documented after their shift, and the average rating of how mentally draining that after-shift work felt dropped from 3.9 to 1.3 out of 5.
"I have to say note-taking, it's not an issue for me anymore... I feel there's one thing that's taken off my plate, which allows me to make more of my focus on the clinical side, not on the paperwork." — Dr Joshua Gibson, Emergency Medicine Specialist and Director at MD.Inc
A record clinicians can stand behind
Note-quality satisfaction rose from 3.6 to 4.1 out of 5, and 8 in 10 clinicians rated their Heidi notes detailed enough for a colleague to pick up the case. Dr Mabasa also pointed to a use he hadn't expected: settling disputes when a patient's account of a visit doesn't match the record.
"If the patient lies, unfortunately, sometimes they do, to say to the doctor this and this, and they didn't take into consideration this, we can see that those things were discussed and can dispute those things. That's a great benefit for governance." — Dr Tiyiselani Mabasa, Emergency Medicine Specialist and Co-Founder of MD.Inc
Dr Essop uses the same transcripts for a different kind of accountability, going back to check exactly what was said between patient and doctor when auditing a case.
Better for the patient, safer for the record
Narrating exams out loud didn't just keep Heidi capturing the visit. It changed what patients understood about their own care, and gave both clinicians more confidence in the record itself.
"The patient feels a lot more that you're doing a lot more for them because you're verbalising it out loud... it's made our consult a lot more comprehensive for them." — Dr Tia Essop, Emergency Medicine Medical Officer at MD.Inc
"It really is user-friendly, and I think it makes you safer. It's just a more robust record-keeping service." — Dr Joshua Gibson, Emergency Medicine Specialist and Director at MD.Inc
Every clinician wants to keep it
100% of surveyed clinicians reported clear benefits and chose to continue using Heidi beyond the pilot. The clinicians who were most skeptical at the outset ended up among its strongest advocates.
"I can't believe I was so hesitant. Heidi is a game changer. It's saving me so much time, and it's so accurate." — Emergency Medicine Doctor, MD.Inc
What's next
Heidi has now been adopted across MD.Inc's full emergency medicine roster. The focus has subsequently shifted from rollout to refinement: MD.Inc's project lead is working alongside Heidi's Customer Success team to further customise Heidi to the department's needs. Quarterly reviews of time saved and note quality will keep the gains visible to clinical leadership as usage deepens.
"If we look back 15, 20 years ago, everyone was handwriting notes. Slowly people moved on to typing. Now things are moving on to AI. Why not catch up now and get a head start?" — Dr Tiyiselani Mabasa, Emergency Medicine Specialist and Co-Founder of MD.Inc
