AI Tools

Five principles guide our use of AI:

• Your clinician is responsible for your care. AI tools support clinicians; they do not make decisions about your diagnosis, investigation, or treatment.
• We use AI only where it provides a real benefit — typically saving clinician time on documentation so more attention is on you.
• We choose AI tools that meet appropriate clinical, regulatory, and data-protection standards. We do not use general-purpose AI tools (such as ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini) with any information that could identify you.
• We are transparent. You will know when AI is being used and you can ask for it not to be used, without that affecting your care.
• We protect your information. Audio and notes processed by AI tools are handled under the same data protection rules as the rest of your clinical record.

Heidi — Ambient Clinical Scribe

Heidi is the AI tool you are most likely to encounter directly. It listens to your consultation and produces a draft clinical note for the clinician to review and finalise.

Here is how it works in practice:

• At the start of the consultation, your clinician will tell you that Heidi is being used. If you would prefer it not to be used, just say so — there is no question to answer, and your care is not affected.
• During the consultation, Heidi listens through the clinician's device and produces a structured draft clinical note in the background. The clinician can then concentrate on you instead of typing.
• After the consultation, the clinician reviews, edits, and approves the final note. Nothing enters your clinical record until the clinician has signed it off. The clinician carries professional responsibility for the accuracy of what is in your record.
• The audio is processed securely under a written data processing agreement with Heidi's provider. The audio is not used to train AI models, and it is deleted in line with the agreed retention period after the clinician has finalised your note.
• If at any point during the consultation you would like the recording paused — for example for a sensitive disclosure — just ask. We will pause it. Anything said while it is paused is not transcribed.

Other AI Tools

We may also use AI in two narrower, less-visible ways. These do not affect your interaction with us during a consultation:

• Within our existing clinical and business systems (for example, search and summary features built into our clinical record system or Microsoft 365). These features operate under the same data-protection arrangements as the systems they sit within.
• Occasional clinician-facing decision-support queries to authorised tools, where the question is framed in a non-identifying way (no patient name, no patient identifier, no detail that would identify you). The clinical decision is always the clinician's, never the tool's.

We do not use AI to make decisions about you, to triage your condition, to set your treatment, or to communicate with you on the practice's behalf.

You have several choices in relation to AI use in your care:

• You can ask for Heidi not to be used in your consultation. Just tell your clinician at the start (or before the consultation, if you prefer). Your care is not affected by this choice and there is no need to give a reason.
• You can ask for the recording to be paused at any point during a consultation, for any reason.
• You can ask to see the clinical note that was produced from your consultation. The note in your record is the final clinician-approved version, not the AI draft.
• You can ask any question you would like about how AI is being used in your care. Either ask your clinician at the time, or contact our Information Governance Lead via hello@northern-medical.co.uk.

Choosing not to have AI used does not change the cost of your care, the standard of your care, or how you are treated.

AI tools handle personal and health information about you. The same data-protection rules that apply to the rest of your information apply to the AI-related processing.

• Heidi's provider is a data processor acting on our behalf under a written data processing agreement. They process the audio only for the purposes we have agreed, and they cannot use it for any other purpose.
• We are the data controller — we decide what is processed, why, and how, and we remain responsible for protecting your information.
• The audio is not used to train AI models.
• Audio is deleted by the provider after the clinician has finalised the clinical note, in line with the retention period set in our written agreement.
• The final clinician-approved note is held in your clinical record and retained in line with our Records Retention Schedule — typically 30 years from your last contact, longer where a procedure record applies.

Our broader handling of your personal information is set out in our Privacy Notice.

Some clinicians at NMP — our visiting consultants — are independent practitioners rather than employees. When they see you at NMP, they use NMP's clinical record system and NMP's Heidi account, not their own. The AI safeguards in this Notice apply equally to consultations with independent clinicians at NMP.

Independent clinicians may use other AI tools when they work outside NMP, but those arrangements are theirs and are not within the scope of this Notice. Any AI tool used in your care at NMP is subject to NMP's governance.

AI tools can make errors. They can mis-hear, mis-transcribe, or summarise inaccurately. We have processes that reduce the risk of these errors reaching your record:

• Every AI-drafted note is reviewed and approved by the clinician before it enters your clinical record.
• The clinician carries professional responsibility for the accuracy of your record under their GMC duties.
• If you spot an error in your record, please tell us and we will correct it. You have a right under data protection law to ask us to put inaccurate information right.
• If you have a wider concern about how AI was used in your care, you can raise it as a complaint under our Complaints Policy. Our Privacy Notice describes the data-specific complaints route to the Information Commissioner's Office.

To make our position clear:

• We will not use AI to decide who can or cannot become an NMP patient.
• We will not use AI to set your treatment plan or to triage you without clinician involvement.
• We will not feed information about you into general-purpose AI tools (ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, or similar).
• We will not allow audio of your consultation to be used to train AI models.
• We will not use AI to write to you on the practice's behalf, or to manage replies to your enquiries.

AI in healthcare is changing quickly. We will update this Notice when our use of AI changes meaningfully — for example, if we adopt a new tool, or if we extend the way an existing tool is used. Where a change is significant, we will draw attention to it on the website at the time.

We do not commit to using every new AI tool that becomes available. Each one is assessed against our principles before it is adopted. The list of approved tools is maintained internally and is available on request.