How Heidi gave Fourways Veterinary Hospital its evenings back
Giulia Pedrazzini
2 September 2026•10 min read••
Fourways Veterinary Hospital x Heidi at a glance
“I don’t have to break the connection by quickly typing on the computer. I know Heidi’s listening, so I can actually pay attention. Owners feel heard, because they don’t see me with a blank stare, processing everything in the background.” — Dr Shira Samson, Veterinarian at Fourways Veterinary Hospital
Key outcomes:
100% of surveyed vets want to keep using Heidi
In-hours documentation time down 25%, from a median of 120 to 90 minutes a day
After-hours note-taking fell from a routine habit to a rare one
4,181 notes produced across 936 hours of captured visits, in a 3-month pilot where all 23 onboarded vets stayed active
Fourways Veterinary Hospital (FVH) runs a 24-hour service in Fourways, Johannesburg, with 25 full-time veterinarians, over 20 nurses and more than 30 assistants, supported by a handful of locums. Amongst them, the team sees 200 to 300 patients a day and holds a standing caseload of 30 to 50 hospitalised animals.
Dr Farai Munjere, head of the after-hours department and a partner veterinarian at the practice, had spent 12 years watching that volume collide with the demands of accurate record-keeping. A visit can run 30 minutes for a routine case, or stretch to one or two hours for a specialist referral, and every one of them needs a history, a physical exam, diagnostics and a treatment plan captured in full.
The practice had already used general AI tools to look up cases, but never one built to document a visit. After a few colleagues tried Heidi on the free plan and felt it could work in a veterinary setting, FVH in collaboration with Heidi’s Customer Success team ran a three-month pilot from March to May 2026, measured against three goals set at kick-off: cut documentation time, produce consistent notes for handover, and protect veterinarian wellbeing.
Challenges
Accuracy at volume
With that many patients moving through in a day, Dr Munjere said the practice was struggling to document conversations with clients as precisely as the record demanded.
“Having an environment where you're seeing a lot of patients every day, with different needs and different complexities, it's very important to be able to document what is wrong with the patient and the conversations with the client accurately.”— Dr Farai Munjere, Veterinarian and Head of After Hours Department, Fourways Veterinary Hospital
Admin that followed vets home
Balancing time with clients against the admin behind each visit was already a strain before Heidi. Dr Munjere described a pattern that had become routine across the team.
“Often this leads to people having to stay after their working hours, three, four hours sometimes, having to do the admin work, because you have to keep the records as accurate as possible.”— Dr Farai Munjere, Veterinarian and Head of After Hours Department, Fourways Veterinary Hospital
Thirty minutes, start to finish
Dr Shira Samson, a GP vet at FVH, sees around 15 patients a day in half-hour slots. Every step of a visit, from history to treatment plan, competes with the same 30 minutes.
“In that 30-minute consult, you have to examine the patient to get the accurate history from the owner. You then have to remember your whole clinical exam, think about what your plan is, request the diagnostics, remember the diagnostics, and then get to the treatment plan. Each step in the process does involve quite a bit of admin, and with a 30-minute time pressure, it is quite a lot.”— Dr Shira Samson, Veterinarian, Fourways Veterinary Hospital
A handover that has to hold up
As a 24-hour hospital, FVH passes patients between shifts every day. Dr Munjere pointed to what that requires of a note once the vet who wrote it has gone home.
“Being a 24-hour hospital, people only work for a certain amount of time, then the hospital is taken over by different individuals or different professionals. So there's a need to accurately communicate whatever you have discovered on a patient to the next.”— Dr Farai Munjere, Veterinarian and Head of After Hours Department, Fourways Veterinary Hospital
Solution
Evidence behind the recommendation, not just a transcript
Dr Samson pointed to Heidi Evidence as a genuine shift in how she works up a case, replacing a search through unrelated results with something built for the question in front of her.
“There's no more looking in a textbook or trying to Google things where all these unrelated products come up. It's very specific, and I like that it gives you the references, so I can actually go and read the articles when I have time.”— Dr Shira Samson, Veterinarian, Fourways Veterinary Hospital
For a vet earlier in her career, that backing changes the conversation in the room.
“Especially being a younger vet, more newly qualified than some of my colleagues, when I look something up on Heidi Evidence and discuss it with the owner, I have the backing. Heidi's allowed us to just be better vets.”— Dr Shira Samson, Veterinarian, Fourways Veterinary Hospital
Staying present in the room
Dr Samson no longer breaks eye contact with an owner to type. She said the shift shows up in how much of the visit she can actually be present for.
“That 30 minutes sort of takes the stress off of me, so I can really connect with the owner, get the history, and not be worrying about what she said, I can't remember that. I can do my clinical exam and really be present, without thinking, was that temperature 37.4 or 37.5.”— Dr Shira Samson, Veterinarian, Fourways Veterinary Hospital
Templates built by a vet, for vets
Rather than adopt a generic template, Dr Samson rebuilt her own note format inside Heidi down to the formatting she already used by hand, and it spread across the team from there.
“I took my own notes that I usually make, and I spent some time playing around and made my own templates, down to what's bold, what's italic. Quite a few of my colleagues use my templates now, because they used to see my notes, so it's a bit more familiar for them, especially the older ones.”— Dr Shira Samson, Veterinarian, Fourways Veterinary Hospital
Heidi's Customer Success team built on that momentum with 16 custom templates built over the pilot, including cardiology and echo templates, a dedicated handover sheet, and dental-specific formats, backed by multiple onboarding sessions, dedicated 1:1 training sessions where needed, and monthly usage reviews with the project team.
Teaching Heidi to speak veterinary
Drug names and clinical shorthand in veterinary medicine differ enough from human medicine that early transcriptions needed correcting. Dr Samson closed that gap herself, one term at a time.
“Being in the veterinary industry, the drug names are very different, and some of the conditions are very different, so you get some weird transcriptions. But they have a replace-always feature, so if that does come up, I've literally highlighted it, put in what I want, and the same for acronyms.”— Dr Shira Samson, Veterinarian, Fourways Veterinary Hospital
Building buy-in across the team
Dr Munjere led the rollout the same way he'd lead any change to how the team works: communicate the benefit first, then support each person through the setup.
“It's very important to get buy-in from the people that are going to be utilising the service, as well as the product. We had to communicate quite regularly before implementation, explaining the benefits of using Heidi, and where it could improve their work-life balance. From there, we took teams individually to help them with the setup and implementation.”— Dr Farai Munjere, Veterinarian and Head of After Hours Department, Fourways Veterinary Hospital
Impact
Adoption that held for the full three months
All 23 onboarded vets created notes in Heidi, running 2,744 sessions and producing 4,181 clinical notes across the quarter, an average of 182 notes per active vet (median 72, ranging from 4 to 626). Usage stayed steady across March, April and May rather than fading after launch week.
Twenty-five percent less time on notes
Median in-hours documentation time fell from 120 to 90 minutes a day. Documentation efficiency satisfaction rose from 2.6 to 3.7 out of 5.
“Accurate history-taking during consults lets me focus on the client, not on writing or typing. Summarising long histories saves me real time.”— A Fourways vet, post-pilot survey
Evenings that stayed evenings
Before Heidi, 7 in 10 vets said they finished notes after hours often or always. By the end of the pilot, after-hours note-taking had dropped to rare, and 5 in 7 vets said they now finish notes during the visit itself, more often than after it.
“Less stress regarding admin tasks after consults on busy days.”— A Fourways vet, post-pilot survey
Dr Munjere saw the same shift across the wider team.
“At least about 70 percent of the vets in the practice gave really positive reviews. If you can do it within a shorter period of time compared to the manual approach, it makes a huge difference to everyone. They can leave early, or on time, instead of having to stay in the practice three or four hours after the shift is finished.”— Dr Farai Munjere, Veterinarian and Head of After Hours Department, Fourways Veterinary Hospital
Notes the next shift can trust
Doctors rated their confidence that a colleague could pick up a Heidi note at 4.3 out of 5, and 6 in 7 said their notes were fully comprehensive often or always, directly supporting handover in a hospital that never closes.
“I love doing my hospital handovers on Heidi, and it helps me take complicated histories on skin cases where owners have seen multiple vets.”— A Fourways vet, post-pilot survey
More time with the owner, not the screen
Work-life balance satisfaction rose from 2.6 to 3.6 out of 5, mental drain from after-hours documentation fell sharply, and 6 in 7 vets said they feel more present with patients.
“So far it makes my working day much more manageable. I feel less stressed anticipating that I have notes to write, and it catches things that could have been missed.”— A Fourways vet, post-pilot survey
Dr Samson connects that presence directly to the trust an owner places in her.
“I don't have to break the connection we have by quickly typing things on the computer. I know Heidi's busy, she's listening, and I can actually pay attention. Trust is so important in what we do, and I feel like Heidi's allowed me to really cultivate those relationships, because owners feel heard.”— Dr Shira Samson, Veterinarian, Fourways Veterinary Hospital
An owner who remembers what was said
Dr Samson also uses Heidi to close the gap between what she explains in the room and what an anxious owner actually retains.
“What Heidi's actually allowed me to do is take my clinical notes and form a summary of everything that we've done, what I've said and the recommendations. And I can give that to the owner, so they have something to refer back to when they get to the car and realise, I don't know what the vet said.”— Dr Shira Samson, Veterinarian, Fourways Veterinary Hospital
Every vet wants to keep it
All surveyed vets reported clear benefits and chose to continue using Heidi beyond the pilot.
“Better history taking, and genuinely useful for time management.”— A Fourways vet, post-pilot survey
What's next
Fourways Veterinary Hospital has successfully adopted Heidi across multiple departments. Dr Munjere sees the shift as part of a longer pattern in how the profession documents its work.
“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 Farai Munjere, Veterinarian and Head of After Hours Department, Fourways Veterinary Hospital
