Heidi Health for Veterinarians: Notes, Consent and PIMS Fit

Yes, a vet practice can try Heidi for clinical notes: it has a veterinarian page, species-tuned templates and a free plan. Before starting, check three things: that its templates and output suit your records, that clients know and agree to the recording, and how the note reaches your practice management system, because I could not verify a named vet integration.

Most of Heidi's site is written for human medicine, with the veterinary page one section among many, so some plan features (health record integration, billing-code support, continuing medical education tracking) still read as medical. That is not a reason to skip it, but it is a reason to run a short trial with real consults before rolling it out, with a vet reading every note before it is filed.

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What Heidi says it does for vets

Heidi's veterinarian page describes a tool that listens to a visit and produces a structured note, including SOAP notes, discharge summaries and custom templates "tuned to any species". It also lists species-relevant answers during a session (Heidi Evidence), a clip-on microphone called Heidi Remote for places such as a surgical suite or a farm call, and a patient list view to review context before each visit. The page presents time-saving and burnout figures; they are the vendor's own and not independent evidence, so test the claim in your own clinic and do not rely on the numbers.

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The template library on Heidi's site lists templates marked as veterinary, for example an anaesthesia consent form. That matters for a practice because consent forms and discharge instructions are the documents that take the longest to type and are the easiest to standardise. Open the library on a free account and read three or four templates against your own. If the headings are not the ones your vets use, you will be editing every note, and the time saving disappears.

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What it costs, as of November 2026

Heidi's pricing page lists a free plan at $0 with unlimited ambient documentation, and a Clinician plan at $110 per user per month billed annually, which adds custom templates, routines for admin tasks, billing-code support and evidence search. A Teams tier is priced on request and is described as including shared templates, shared sessions and integration with health record systems, with optional single sign-on. The comparison table also shows a usage allowance on lower plans, so read it before assuming "unlimited" applies to every feature.

An illustrative sum for a three-vet practice on Clinician: 3 x $110 = $330 per month, or $3,960 a year. If each vet recovers 20 minutes of note-writing on a day with eight consults, that is about 100 minutes a week each, or 300 minutes across the three, which is five hours a week. You do not need to believe a precise figure: measure your own notes before and after, and compare the monthly cost with what those hours are worth to you.

Consent: telling clients and getting a yes

Recording a consult records the owner as well as the pet, and often a child, a partner on speakerphone or a staff member. Heidi's privacy policy says audio is deleted when processing finishes unless you turn on a feature that saves recordings, which reduces what stays on file. Transcripts and notes are a separate matter: for individual subscribers the policy says session data is kept as you configure it or until you delete it, so set a retention period you can explain to a client. None of this removes your duty to tell people. In some places the law requires everyone on a recording to consent, so treat a spoken yes as the minimum and ask your lawyer or professional body what applies to you.

A layered approach works in most practices. Tell clients when they book, show a notice at reception, and ask again at the start of the consult. Here is illustrative wording to adapt.

At booking (text or email):
"To help me concentrate on [PET NAME] rather than the keyboard, I use an AI note-taking tool that listens to the consultation and drafts my notes. Audio is not kept after the note is produced. If you would rather I did not use it, just say so when you arrive and I will type the notes myself. There is no difference in the care you receive."

At reception (sign):
"Our vets may use an AI scribe during consultations. Ask us if you would like to opt out."

In the consult room (spoken):
"I'm going to turn on the note-taker now, is that all right with you?"

Check the line "audio is not kept" against the setting you actually chose in Heidi before you use it. If you turn on saved recordings for any reason, change the wording. Stating something to a client that is not true of your setup is a worse problem than not having a scribe.

The detailed consent wording tutorial for recorded consults covers more cases, such as phone consults and clients who decline.

Does the note fit your practice system?

This is the question the title raises, and the honest answer is that you need to test it. I could not find a named veterinary practice management system integration on Heidi's own pages. The veterinarian page says Heidi "works across the systems you already use", and the Teams plan mentions integration with health record systems, without saying which. Treat integration as unproven until Heidi confirms it in writing for your system.

The test takes a morning. Run it with a free account and your usual practice system.

1. Ask first. Email Heidi's sales team: "Which veterinary practice management systems do you integrate with, how does the note reach the record, and on which plan?" Keep the reply.
2. Test copy and paste. Generate a note, copy it, and paste it into a test patient record. Check whether headings, line breaks and bullet characters survive, and whether your system's field limits cut anything off.
3. Test your templates. If your system uses structured fields (history, physical exam by body system, assessment, plan), try to match Heidi's template headings to them so a paste lands in the right box.
4. Test an edit round trip. Change a dose in the practice system and in Heidi, and check that you know which version is the record. The system of record should always be your practice system.
5. Time it. Count seconds from the end of the consult to a filed note. If the paste step is two minutes, the saving is smaller than the scribe's headline suggests.

A mismatch usually shows up in small things: a number list turned into a paragraph, a table that pastes as plain text, or headings your system has no field for. All are fixable with a template tweak, but only if you test before you buy.

An example: a three-vet practice runs a two-week trial

An illustrative plan. A small-animal practice with three vets and two nurses picks the vet who dislikes typing most as the trial user, on the free plan. Over ten working days she records every consult where the client consents, about eight a day, and files each note after checking it.

She keeps a one-line log per consult: minutes to review and file, errors found, and whether the owner objected. At the end she totals it. On the sample figures below, review time averages four minutes against the six or seven she used to spend writing from scratch, and she found errors in about one note in five.

Write your decision rule before the trial, not after, so a pleasant first week does not decide for you. The ten-consult scorecard gives a fuller marking scheme if you want to compare Heidi with another scribe.

What goes wrong in vet notes, and how to spot it

Scribes hear what is said, and consults are noisy. Vets have the same few failure patterns across tools, and they are worth putting on a laminated card beside the monitor.

• Doses and units. "Half a mil" becomes "5 ml", or milligrams per kilogram become milligrams. Check every drug, dose, route and frequency against your own plan.
• Species and patient mix-ups. A note for a dog picks up a feline-specific phrase from a template, or a second pet mentioned in conversation is recorded as the patient.
• Owner statements recorded as findings. "She's been drinking more" is history, not an exam finding. A scribe can place it in the wrong section.
• Things said but not done. "We could do bloods" becomes "bloods taken". Read the plan for things you only offered.
• Invented normals. A template with default exam findings can record "heart sounds normal" when you did not say so. Delete defaults you did not examine.

An illustrative before and after. The spoken consult: "Right, let's start her on a quarter tablet twice a day with food, and we'll look at the bloods next week." A first draft might read "Start on 1 tablet twice daily with food. Bloods taken, recheck next week." The corrections are the quantity of tablet and the status of the bloods. Those two changes are why the vet must read every note.

A template to start from

If Heidi's library has nothing close to your practice's style, a custom template (Clinician plan) is the way to make the output consistent. This is an illustrative shape for a routine consult, written as the instruction you would give the scribe.

Write a veterinary consultation note in SOAP format.
Subjective: reason for visit, owner's history in their own words, duration, appetite, water intake, toilets, medication given at home.
Objective: only findings the vet stated aloud. Weight, temperature, heart rate, respiratory rate if stated. Do not add normal findings that were not mentioned.
Assessment: the vet's stated differential or working diagnosis, with confidence as spoken.
Plan: investigations offered and whether accepted or declined; treatment with drug, dose, route and frequency exactly as stated; owner instructions; recheck date.
If anything was unclear in the audio, write [CHECK] instead of guessing.

The [CHECK] instruction is the practical part. It gives you a visible marker to search for before filing, so a doubtful dose does not slip through as a clean sentence.

Discharge instructions: the quickest win, with a before and after

In some practices the consult note is not the real time sink; the discharge sheet is. Owners need clear written instructions, and typing them after a long day is where corners get cut. Heidi's page lists discharge summaries among its outputs, so test them early.

Illustrative before: the vet says aloud, "Keep her quiet for ten days, lead walks only, tablets with food, call us if she stops eating or the wound looks red." A rough draft from the scribe might read: "Rest 10 days. Lead walks. Give tablets with food. Contact the practice if appetite changes or wound redness." The vet then changes it into plain owner language: "Keep [pet] quiet for ten days: short walks on the lead only, no running, jumping or stairs if you can help it. Give the tablets with a meal. Ring us the same day if [pet] stops eating, if the wound becomes red, swollen or smelly, or if you are worried for any reason." Two edits matter: the draft was written for a colleague, not an owner, and it left out the "ring us if you are worried" line that your practice always includes.

Put that standard closing line into the template itself so it appears every time. A scribe template can hold fixed wording, which is another reason the custom templates on the paid plan are worth testing against the free ones. The tutorial on pet owner emails and treatment explanations shows how to turn the same material into a follow-up message.

When a client says no, and other awkward moments

Staff need a script for the unusual cases, because the first time one arises will be mid-consult. Agree these answers in advance.

• The owner declines. The vet says "That's fine," switches the scribe off and types or dictates the note afterwards. No second request, no pressure, and a tick in the record that the owner opted out so the next vet does not ask them to reconsider mid-visit.
• The owner consents but a second person arrives. If a partner or child joins and might be recorded, pause and ask again. A consent given by one person does not cover everyone in the room.
• The owner asks what happens to the recording. Answer with what you have verified: audio is used to create the note and, per Heidi's policy, deleted once processing finishes unless a saving feature is on. If you do not know your setting, say you will check and tell them, and then do.
• A euthanasia or end-of-life consult. Some vets will prefer not to record these at all, or to ask very gently. Make it a standing exception your vets can use without explanation, with a note typed afterwards.
• A phone consult. Consent has to be given on the call, before the scribe is started, and noted. A desktop app that captures call audio changes what is recorded, so check what it captures before you use it.

Practice managers sometimes worry that opt-outs will make the tool pointless. In the illustrative trial above, two owners in 62 declined, and the vet simply typed those notes. The point of the trial is to find out what your own rate is.

A mobile vet and a nurse clinic: two different fits

The same tool behaves differently by setting. Take a mobile large-animal vet who spends the day in yards and fields. The page's clip-on microphone, Heidi Remote, is aimed at this, and wind and animal noise are the risk. Test it on a noisy farm call before you trust it on a day when you have no time to correct notes, and pay attention to the numbers: dose, weight and herd or batch identifiers are the things noise destroys. Whether to use it for herd health visits with many animals depends on whether the template can hold a list, which you can only learn by trying.

Now a nurse-led clinic running weigh-ins, vaccinations and dental checks. These consults are short and repetitive, so a scribe saves less per visit, and a fixed template or a simple macro in the practice system may do as well. Here the free plan may be all you need, or you may find that a scribe does not earn its place. Not every practice needs one, and a trial that ends in "no" has still saved the subscription.

Staff training in thirty minutes

Run one short session before anyone uses the scribe on a real consult. Cover the consent wording and where it is displayed, how to start and stop the recording, how to mark a note as an opt-out, the five error types above, and the rule that the vet files the note. Then give each trial vet a ten-line practice consult to run on a colleague, and have a second vet check the draft for errors with a red pen. That exercise teaches the team what mistakes look like more quickly than a lecture, and it gives you a baseline error rate before real patients are involved.

The review rule that keeps the vet responsible

The vet in the room is accountable for the record, so write the rule into your protocols and your induction. Three lines are enough: the vet reads every AI-drafted note before it is filed; the vet corrects doses, species and findings; the vet files it under their own name. Do not let nurses or receptionists file scribe notes for a vet unseen, and do not copy an AI summary into an owner email without reading it.

When a mistake gets through, record it as an incident, find out where it came from (audio, template or the vet's own speech), and change the template or the habit. Over a month the same two or three errors will recur, and fixing them is how accuracy improves. The tutorial on AI for vet clinical notes covers the same workflow without a named product.

How to decide, and what to compare Heidi with

If the trial passes your decision rule, move the trial vet to a paid plan only if you need custom templates, or keep the free plan if the standard templates serve. If Heidi fits the notes but not the system, ask about Teams or look at another scribe. The Nabla versus Heidi comparison sets out what each stores and for how long. For practices still deciding whether a scribe is the right first tool, the scribe, phone or chatbot first guide helps you rank the options.

One last check before you go live: write down the plan you chose, the audio setting, the consent wording and the review rule on one page, date it and put it in your staff handbook. A year from now, when a client asks how the practice uses AI, you will have an answer that matches what you actually do.

Questions vets ask before trying Heidi

Does Heidi have templates written for vets?

Heidi's veterinarian page describes SOAP notes, discharge summaries and custom templates tuned to any species, and its template library lists items marked as veterinary, such as an anaesthesia consent form. Open the library on a free account and check whether the templates match how your practice writes records.

Does Heidi connect directly to my practice management system?

I could not verify a named integration with a veterinary system on Heidi's pages. Its veterinarian page says it works across the systems you already use, and its Teams plan lists integration with health record systems. Ask Heidi in writing which vet systems it supports, and test copy-paste into yours in the meantime.

Do I need to tell clients I am recording the consult?

Yes, as a matter of good practice, and in some places the law requires every party to consent to a recording. Tell clients at booking, put a notice at reception and ask again at the start of the consult. Your lawyer or professional body can confirm what applies to you.

Does Heidi keep the audio?

Heidi's privacy policy says audio is used to create the transcript and is deleted as soon as processing is complete, unless you enable a feature that saves recordings. Check that setting at the start, write down what you chose, and re-read the policy before you rely on it.

Can the scribe sign off or file a note without me?

It should not. A scribe produces a draft from what it heard. A vet reads it, corrects drug names, doses and species, and then files it. Treat the output the way you would a nurse's handwritten draft, never as the finished record.

Further reads

• AI Receptionist for a Veterinary Practice: Setup and Call Scripts — Front-desk calls and scripts once notes are sorted.
• AI Agents for Veterinarians: Check-Ins, Rebooking and Reorders — Check-ins and rebooking that follow from good notes.
• AI for Veterinary Practice Owners: Costs, Tools, and First Steps — Costs and first steps for practice owners new to AI.
• AI App for Veterinarians on the Road: Notes, Quotes, Routes — Notes, quotes and routes for vets working on the road.
• Heidi Health for Dentists: Setup, Templates and Patient Consent — Setup and consent steps in a neighbouring profession.
• Vet Practice Management Software (PIMS): Which AI Tools Cost Extra? — Which AI notes, reminder and messaging tools come inside a vet PIMS, which are add-ons, and how to cost a switch.
• AI Tools and AI Development: The Complete 2026 Guide — the AI hub, including every tutorial in the AI-for-business series.

Sources: Heidi Health 'Heidi for veterinarians' page, pricing page in USD, privacy policy retention table and template library 'Veterinarian Templates' list (all checked 4 November 2026).