Nourish Family Nutrition & Therapy recovers $10,000 in lost clinical time using Heidi

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Background

Nourish Family Nutrition & Therapy, a dedicated team of 28 specialized and experienced Registered Dietician Nutritionists and Psychotherapists, is committed to creating personalized nutrition plans that yield sustainable results. The clinic offers a variety of nutrition and therapy services by telehealth to individuals, families, and businesses throughout the United States.

Challenges

While Nourish Family Nutrition had experienced strong growth and positive feedback, several administrative challenges were making the expansion of their unique model of care challenging. 

Admin taking over billable hours

The only reliable way for clinicians to have documentation time available during business hours was to quarantine blocks of client-free time. This reduced billable hours and placed clinicians under stress when competing priorities encroached on their admin time.

Insufficient detail for insurance purposes

Nourish Family Nutrition prides itself on offering affordable clinical support by working with most insurers. However, at times, documentation lacking in detail would result in claims denials.

Quality of internal notes

Due to its rapid growth and remote operations, Nourish had struggled to achieve team-wide standardization in high-quality documentation processes.  

Note-taking impacting client engagement

Although overall feedback from clients of Nourish Family Nutrition & Therapy was overwhelmingly positive, some clients felt that practitioners were often preoccupied with typing, which affected their engagement during sessions.

Solution

To address these issues, Nourish Family Nutrition conducted a 12-week trial with Heidi’s AI Medical Scribe in mid-2024.

Top 3 favourite features:

• Standardized, shareable team templates
• ‘Ask Heidi’ feature creating tailored documents for clinicians and clients
• Intelligent automation beyond mere transcription

Impact

Within just 12 weeks, Nourish Family Nutrition saved 6,064 minutes in documentation time and achieved a 5x ROI on setup costs.

Key outcomes: 

• 6,064 minutes (100+ hours) saved in documentation
• $10k recovered in clinician billable hours
• 500% ROI on implementation costs
• Standardized notes meeting insurance requirements
• Enhanced clinical engagement during sessions

Regaining time and billable hours

Clinicians now enjoy greater flexibility and autonomy without cramming documentation between sessions.

A manager at Nourish stated: “Practitioners feel like they have their whole day back, have a lot more time, and feel less rushed.”

This has also positively impacted the bottom line, with over $10k recovered in clinician billable hours in just 12 weeks.

Thorough and standardized documentation

The Nourish Family team (and their insurance partners) have loved Heidi’s ability to produce detailed and accurate documentation, incl. automatic claim generation with a click of a button - so no claim goes unfulfilled. 

Improved patient care

Freedom from the burden of note-taking can also provide avenues for clinicians to go deeper with clients on complex topics, such as eating disorders. This is because they have the space and awareness to pick up on subtle cues that might otherwise be missed when the practitioner is preoccupied with their notes.

“I am able to be more present during the sessions, and the patients have noticed.”

Unexpected benefits

Most of the clients at Nourish received individualized meal plans as part of their treatment. 

However, these can be very time-consuming to write and adjust from scratch.

A surprising benefit the team found is that the ‘Ask Heidi’ feature can generate recipes, which the practitioner can then adjust and give to the client.

In addition to streamlined meal planning, a dietician at Nourish was impressed when Heidi auto-suggested ingredient substitutions based on in-session comments from a client. 

“During an appointment, a client mentioned they are price-sensitive after I recommended a salmon recipe. When I then generated their note, there was already a comment in the patient explainer section suggesting that canned salmon could be used as a cost-effective option if preferred. The client loved it!” 

What’s next

The overall sentiment was well summarised by one of the clinicians: “Heidi enhances what we do, not replaces us.”

The team is excited to continue with their more relaxed schedules, which allow ample time for documentation between each appointment.

They also look forward to experimenting further with the Ask Heidi feature, which has already dramatically reduced the time needed to create custom diet plans for each client.

Download the case study one-pager here.