You've been using your veterinary AI note taker for a couple of years now - it’s great - saves you heaps of time.

But are you using it to its full potential?

I’ll take a bet that you’re not. These things move fast, and it’s hard to keep up.

Which is why, in our Tech for Vets Series, we pull apart the veterinary tools that are changing how we work, and this time we put Heidi up on our screens for a detailed walk through.

Our guide is Dr Kieran McLeod, head of medical knowledge at Heidi Health. We start by putting the scribe through its paces to find the workflow tricks that you’re probably missing - I walked away with at least five tricks I'd never used. Then Kieran shows off all the shiny new AI magic coming your way: voice agents, built-in clinical support and a hardware solution that lets you leave your phone in your bag.

You'll learn:

• The scribe features you're almost certainly ignoring - linked patients, the context window, smart dictation, and the one-click voice edits that mean you never type a note correction again
• The AI voice agent that makes the phone call you've been dreading
• What baked-in clinical decision support looks like
• How to safety-net the worry that keeps you up - that quiet "did I miss something?" feeling
• How to incorporate hands-free hardware into your workflow

This is a screen-share walkthrough, so head to Spotify if you want to watch the clicks rather than just hear us talk about them.

Show notes and details live at thevetvault.com

Get clinical support from human specialists at the Vet Vault Specialist Support Space

Get rid of your mid-year 'meh' at our Vets On Tour New Zealand snow conference

Topics and Timestamps

02:35 Intro: Beyond the scribe0

05:18 Human-first vs. vet-first: does it matter?

09:17 Note-taking basics

09:46 Context windows & linked patients

15:46 Multiple documents & the source of truth

18:49 Smart Dictation for quick edits

29:38 Sync changes across documents

33:10 Task lists

36:06 Collaboration & session sharing

40:07 Sharing & exporting documents

41:22 Heidi Comms: AI voice agents

53:46 Heidi Evidence: clinical decision support

01:04:50 Using Evidence for complex histories

01:09:11 Evidence sources & collections

01:14:01 Heidi Remote: the hardware mic

01:21:46 EMR integrations (ezyVet & Covetrus)

A surgeon hurls a scalpel across theatre. It clatters off the wall. Nobody looks up.

Twenty minutes later he's in the tearoom offering everyone a biscuit, and someone shrugs: "That's just him when he's stressed."

If you've worked in veterinary practice for any length of time, you've got your own version of that story - maybe a bit less dramatic, but still things that completely destroy psychological safety. This episode is about that stuff, and the new psychosocial safety laws now rolling out across Australia that say plainly: no, actually, that's not acceptable.

To make sense of what that looks like on a normal Tuesday in a normal practice, you'll hear from psychologist Rhonda Andrews, who works across high-pressure industries - emergency departments, the courts, and the veterinary profession - and who has spent years watching them all wrestle with the same problem: people breaking.

This conversation is not about “just be more resilient”, but about systems. Rhonda makes a genuinely good-news case that these laws aren't more bureaucracy to dread - they're the push our profession has needed all along.

You'll hear

• Why the things you've always filed under "just part the job" might now legally count as a psychological workplace injury - with consequences attached
• The myth spreading fastest right now - that bosses can no longer have an honest performance conversation - and why that's flatly wrong
• What the new psychosocial safety laws actually require of you as a practice owner
• Why this a team problem, not just something for management to sort out
• Why "workload" is almost never the real problem - and the thing breaking your team underneath it that owners consistently miss
• The one shift available to everyone in the building - whatever their title - that changes culture without a single policy change

A note: this is the second in a small psych-safety miniseries. If you haven't heard Episode 158 with Dr Rebecca Faris on the AVA Thrive programme, start there for the bigger picture.

Resources:

• Barrington Centre - Rhonda's psychosocial safety seminars (two online sessions, plus an in-person Melbourne day) and the Vet ECM training programmes for owners, leaders, and new supervisors: barringtoncentre.com

For show notes, clinical content and the newsletter head to thevetvault.com, and come find your people at a Vets On Tour conference - email me at info@thevetvault.com to find out about our new-grad 50% discount for Wānaka inAugust.

Topics and time stamps

04:52 Rising Mental Health Claims

08:41 Mythbusting Owners Fears1

0:37 Defining Psychological Safety

12:37 Vets Staying in Bad Jobs

14:28 Sponsor Break Vets On Tour

16:03 Systems vs Individual Responsibility

19:35 Burnout Stats and Human Cost

21:17 Who Can Influence Culture?

22:46 Is Vet Work Uniquely Hard?

24:05 Human Sector Parallels

29:15 Business Model Reality Check

30:18 ROI of Retention

32:20 Psychosocial Safety Laws

37:34 Workload and Rostering Fixes4

2:44 Leadership and Being Heard

45:27 From Blame to Pathways

50:27 Training Programs and Teams

52:58 Myth Busting Performance Reviews

54:27 Final Takeaways

The long-term vision is that you walk into a clinic, hit record at the beginning of the day - you walk out at the end of the day, and you never put your hands in a computer. You just did medicine, and everything went into the right place.’

Sound too good to be true? Maybe. But it's closer than you think.

If you've already adopted a veterinary AI scribe, you'll know it's transformed your day. But scribes are just the gateway drug. The really interesting question is what your scribe connects to next - and the answer, for a growing number of vets, is the brain of the clinic itself: your practice management software.

This conversation brings together Dr Caleb Frankel, ER vet and founder of Instinct - the PIMS used by many of the world's largest specialty and emergency hospitals, and now built out for general practice too, and Rohan Relan, founder of Scribble Vet. Earlier this year, Instinct acquired Scribble - and what they're building together is a glimpse of where veterinary software could be heading.

You'll hear:

• Why up to 80% of your veterinary work day is swallowed by a keyboard
• What "beyond scribing" looks like - from infographics, to embedded drug references that update in real time as you talk, to anaesthesia records that fill themselves in from across the room.
• The "easy to verify, hard to generate" principle - why the best AI tools in clinic don't try to replace you, they let you stay in the loop without doing the grunt work.
• What it means when your scribe and your PIMS talk to each other.
• Why an "open API" matters more than you think when individual vets can magically build for their own tools.
• The tech patient safety layer that can catch your mistakes before you make them
• Where this all goes next - and why both guests believe we're still only seeing the beginning of what AI in clinical practice can do.

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We recorded this as a video with screen sharing, so if you want to follow along and see what these tools actually look like in action, watch it on Spotify.

For our clinical content, show notes, and our full back catalogue, head to ⁠thevetvault.com⁠.

While you're there, check out our subscriber-only clinical podcast, our newsletter, and come and hang out with us in real life at ⁠Vets On Tour.

Topics and Timestamps

Why Instinct Acquired Scribble 2:08

Beyond Scribes: The Bigger Vision 7:48

Demo: Scribble + Instinct Integration 10:06

Plums Drug Reference Integration 11:30

Mid-Roll: Events & Announcements 14:49

Pushing Notes to Instinct 16:27

Scribble Features: Translations, Care Cards & More 19:29

Record Review & AI Verifiability 21:28

Instinct PIMS Overview 24:17

Instinct Expands to General Practice 24:51

Instinct Features: Estimates, Safety Warnings & Clinical Tools 32:03

Embedded Scribble: Voice-Controlled Anesthesia Records 38:07

AI Safety: Human in the Loop 38:46

APIs, MCP Servers & Vibe Coding for Vets 45:02

Open vs Closed PIMS Philosophy 50:39