A number of clinicians at Creek Road General Practice are using a new software type called a Medical Scribe or AI Medical Scribe. Below we go into detail with why they are being used, how they work and the finer details around them that you as a patient may be interested in.
A chunk of the day in general practice is taken up with administration, with one of the most time consuming tasks being writing medical notes for each consultation. Medical notes are made to clearly document what happens in a consultation to an extent that another doctor should be able to read the notes made and seamlessly continue your care.
Overseas for quite some years there has been the role of a “Medical Scribe”, a job often performed by a medical student, which would involve the scribe taking notes as the GP and patient talked. With improvements in technology, this role is now being performed by software.
Heidi Health is the software being used at Creek Road General Practice, which transcribes the conversation with your doctor (it does not record it) and then organises it into notes. This allows your GP to pay full attention to you during the consultation rather than having to write notes.
Heidi Health is a separate application to the medical record, so once the consultation is complete the notes are then checked for accuracy by your doctor and copied to your notes. This means there is no identifying data given to the application apart from what is said during the consultation. The data is not used for AI model training, and Heidi Health meets all Australian Data privacy laws, and the servers are based in Australia.
Your GP will always get your consent prior to using a tool like this during a consultation, and you are free to ask your GP not to use this tool if you prefer.
More details regarding Heidi Health are available here.