Louise Nott x Heidi at a glance
“I leave the clinic with this sense of ease that I’ve done everything. It’s not this cloud hanging over you. It’s a lightness.” - Dr Louise Nott, Associate Professor and Medical Oncologist
Key outcomes:
- 188 hours of clinician time returned annually.
- 95 percent reduction in documentation costs.
- 75 percent increase in monthly letter output.
- Same-day referrals and care coordination.
- Reduced cognitive and emotional load after clinic.
Read on if you might also be experiencing:
- Long oncology consults followed by hours of dictation after work.
- Disjointed documentation workflows that take weeks to complete.
- High transcription costs with limited clinical value.
- Siloed admin that leaves teams working without context.
- Ongoing anxiety about unfinished admin outside clinic hours.
Background
Dr Louise Nott is a medical oncologist based in Hobart, Tasmania, working across both public and private practice at the Royal Hobart Hospital and Icon Cancer Centre. She works full-time in a high-volume oncology setting, balancing long new patient consultations with frequent review appointments.
Her clinical work involves detailed discussions around diagnosis, prognosis, treatment options, side effects, and goals of care. These conversations are emotionally demanding and clinically complex. Accurate, timely documentation is essential for patient safety, continuity of care, and communication with referrers, nursing teams, and other specialists.
Alongside clinical practice, Louise is a clinician researcher and educator, supervising and teaching trainees. The pace and complexity of oncology care leave little margin for inefficient systems or delayed recall.
Challenges
Before adopting Heidi, Louise faced a growing documentation burden driven by complex consults, short clinic slots, and delayed transcription workflows. Capturing nuance accurately was difficult, information often arrived too late to support care, and administrative work regularly spilled into evenings and weekends.
Heavy time loss to dictation
“We would scribble notes and then dictate usually after hours and try and remember what happened in that consultation.”
Prior to Heidi, Louise lost an average of 188 hours per year to clinician dictation. That dictation required approximately 846 hours of typist time annually, creating significant overhead without improving clinical care.
Costly and inefficient transcription workflows
“You’d wait for it to be typed, correct it all, and then it would be sent out.”
The traditional workflow, dictate, send to typist, review, resend, often took weeks. At a cost of $0.25 per line, this amounted to more than $35,000 per year in transcription costs alone.
Lack of real-time clinical visibility
“That information wasn’t there in a contemporaneous way so the nurses seeing the patient didn’t have what we discussed.”
Delays meant critical decisions about medications, side effects, or care plans were not visible to nurses or other clinicians at the time they were caring for the patient. Teams were often working without full context.
Persistent after-hours burden
“Very rarely in the old system could I get everything done.”
Even when Louise left the clinic on time, unfinished documentation followed her home. The mental load of pending letters and referrals created ongoing stress and limited recovery time outside work.
Solution
Louise first encountered ambient documentation tools through oncology peer groups. After trialling an early alternative, she was encouraged to try Heidi.
“I tried Heidi and found that it was just a little bit better for what I needed. And it kept improving.”
What began as a trial quickly became embedded in her daily practice.
“I got myself so hooked. I thought, ‘I can't do my work without Heidi now.’”
Today, Heidi runs in ambient mode for the majority of consultations. Louise uses structured templates for new patients, review visits, discharge summaries, and referrals. Scan results, blood tests, and PDFs are added before the consult so clinical context is captured accurately in real time.
Robust patient consent processes are supported by Heidi-provided resources, including printable consent forms and patient information materials.
Heidi is now used for:
- Real-time consultation notes.
- Structured oncology letters.
- Same-day referrals and certificates.
- Task generation and follow-up documentation.
- Patient summaries outlining discussions and next steps.
Louise’s top 3 favourite features
- Ambient documentation: removing the need for dictation.
- Customisable templates: producing clear, GP-friendly letters and documentation.
- Built-in task and referral generation: accelerating care pathways and patient experience.
Impact
“Probably the most profound thing is being able to sit and talk to the patient and look at them.”
With Heidi, Louise’s workflow shifted from delayed documentation to real-time completion. The impact extends beyond efficiency, reshaping how care is delivered, shared, and experienced by both clinicians and patients.
Key outcomes:
- 188 hours of clinician dictation time saved per year.
- 75% increase in monthly documentation output.
- Annual documentation costs reduced by 95 percent.
- Same-day completion of clinic letters and referrals.
- Real-time visibility of decisions for nurses, GPs, and care teams.
- Restored presence during complex oncology consultations.
Measurable efficiency and cost savings
“Switching to Heidi saved the 188 hours a year that went to dictation.”
By moving away from dictation entirely, Louise eliminated both clinician and typist time. Annual costs dropped from over $35,000 to $1,599, while documentation output increased significantly.
Faster, clearer communication
“It generates those tasks and I can just press the button and it’s sent off that day.”
Referrals, letters, and certificates are completed during or immediately after the consult. This allows investigations, procedures, and treatment steps to move forward without unnecessary delays.
Stronger patient understanding
“They leave with a summary of what we discussed and the next steps.”
Patients receive clear written summaries after complex oncology consults. This supports reflection at home and better-informed follow-up conversations.
Restored presence and calm
“You’re actually there for the patient.”
Without a screen or dictation device competing for attention, Louise can observe how patients respond, move, and interact. This presence is critical in oncology care and difficult to quantify, but deeply felt.
What’s Next
“It’s great to use a tool that gets better with time.”
Louise sees Heidi as a long-term partner in her practice. As oncology care becomes more complex, she values a system that continues to evolve, deepen workflow integration, and support both individual clinicians and teams.
Through enterprise onboarding, template sharing, superuser support, and ongoing product improvements, Heidi is now scaling across Icon, helping clinicians support each other and standardise high-quality documentation.
“[Life is] calmer. I bounce out rather than dragging.”
With administrative load reduced and documentation handled in the background, Louise can continue focusing on what matters most: being fully present with her patients, confident that the rest is taken care of.
