Rural Clinic Gets Back a Full Day (10+ Hours) Each Week

"It's saved us hours and hours of work. Now we've got four providers on it and we've also spread the love to two other clinics in the area." — Blake Thompson, FNP

About Blake Thompson, FNP

Blake is a family nurse practitioner at a rural family medicine practice in Idaho. He handles everything from newborns to centenarians — "cradle to grave," as he puts it.

On top of his four-day-a-week clinic schedule, he also runs a direct primary care practice focused on strength athletes, including competitive strongmen and CrossFitters.

Coming from an emergency medicine and urgent care background where he once saw 85 patients in a 12-hour shift, Blake has a high bar for efficiency.

He's also become something of an unofficial Freed evangelist — personally bringing the tool to multiple providers and clinics across his area.

The problem: Days lost to notes and checklists

"I used to get there at seven o'clock in the morning and go home at about seven o'clock at night." — Blake Thompson, FNP

Blake had been through the full evolution of documentation tools. Manual entry, then Dragon Dictation, then fighting with eClinicalWorks' built-in scribe feature (which he describes charitably as difficult). His post-visit routine looked like this:

• Scribble notes during the visit, hoping not to miss details
• Return to his desk and dictate the full note into Dragon
• Manually copy and paste each section into the correct ECW field
• Review, correct dictation errors, and sign off

That process ran 8–12 minutes after every single visit. Multiply that by 16–24 patients a day and the math is brutal. He was also leaning heavily on checkbox templates — efficient, but impersonal, and easy to miss things that actually came up in conversation.

Finding Freed

Blake found Freed through a social media ad. He'd already tried a competing tool and didn't love the interface. When he first ran Freed, the thing that got him was simple: he didn't have to configure it or tell it what he wanted. It just worked.

His clinic's administration was skeptical at first — concerned about legality and HIPAA compliance. Blake sent them Freed's documentation, they reviewed it with their lawyer, got the all-clear, and agreed to let Blake trial it solo for a month.

One month later, four providers in his office were using it. Since then, he's personally introduced Freed to a psychiatric nurse practitioner's office and a local orthopedics practice.

The solution: Complete notes before the visit ends

"Within two minutes of walking out of my last patient's room, I'm leaving." — Blake Thompson, FNP

Blake now runs Freed on his laptop alongside his EMR, with both open in separate browser tabs. His current workflow:

• Hit start on Freed when he walks into the room
• Have a natural conversation — no typing, no laptop propped between him and the patient
• Dictate exam findings out loud as he goes ("your lung sounds are clear, your heart's in a normal rhythm") so Freed captures them in real time
• Send orders, referrals, and prescriptions before the visit even ends
• Drag and drop into ECW and sign off

He's out by 5:30pm. Every day.

"I'd say on average about an hour and a half to two hours a day are saved just by myself. And now there are five or six providers using Freed. Just the hours saved is incredible." — Blake Thompson, FNP

Why He Chose Freed

Team adoption without the friction

What started with Blake has expanded to other providers in his practice, plus adoption by two other local clinics. The entire team now saves hours each week, and has multiplied the impact across their rural healthcare system.

"I've kind of been a little missionary for Freed. I like it that much." — Blake Thompson, FNP

Because Freed requires no EHR integration or IT involvement to get started, Blake was able to get colleagues up and running on his own. For browser-based EHRs, Freed can push notes directly with one click — otherwise it's a simple copy-paste into existing templates.

Accuracy and note quality

Blake's notes are  richer and more personalized than standard cookie-cutter templates. Freed captures the full context of a conversation — including details he might have skipped just because re-adding them felt like too much work.

"It catches so many things that I talked about with my patient that I wouldn't have put in the chart because I didn't want to take the time to go back and add it." — Blake Thompson, FNP

He cites an example: a patient mentioning a sister's breast cancer diagnosis. In the past, he might not have gone back to add the screening diagnosis code and order. Now it's captured automatically, and the follow-through happens.

Patient accountability

The transcript feature is a valuable record of patient conversations. Having accurate transcripts even helped remove negative reviews, with evidence of what was actually discussed during visits.

"It's gotten us a couple of apologies. It keeps things literal. It keeps things objective." — Blake Thompson, FNP

His favorite Freed features

Natural conversation capture

Freed lets Blake have uninterrupted conversations without a laptop between him and his patients. He's also found that dictating exam findings aloud — for Freed to pick up — actually resonates with patients.

One of his patients was a nurse herself. She told him, "I wish I had that at the hospital."

Patient context

Blake's favorite newer feature. Before a visit, he pulls up the patient summary of their history and last visit. He's also able to use the clinician assistant to pull patient details in real time.

For a provider managing a full panel of patients with complex chronic conditions, that context before walking into the room is significant.

"My nurse will say, 'I'm going to room Jim Bob.' I'll pull him up in Freed and go, 'okay, it looks like last time we gave him this.' Just that summarization — because that is the hardest thing." — Blake Thompson, FNP

Prompted edits

Blake uses the clinician assistant to instantly clean up specific sections — like when a subjective finding ends up in the physical exam. He'll prompt it to move things around and get the note structured the way he actually signs it (APSO format, with assessment and plan at the top).

Document upload and summary

For his direct primary care practice, where he hasn't yet invested in a separate EMR, Blake uses Freed to attach and summarize lab results and outside documents. It reads them and gives him a summary — effectively serving as a lightweight chart system for that side of his practice.

The results

Blake estimates he saves 1.5–2 hours per day. Across the five or six providers now using Freed — spanning his family medicine practice, a psychiatric NP office, and an orthopedics practice — the cumulative time savings across a week runs well into double digits.

The quality of documentation in his region has also shifted noticeably.

"You can tell who's on Freed — you're seeing the diagnosis, the summary, the plan formatted out clearly. It's so clean. I can actually figure out what they want from me." — Blake Thompson, FNP

Freed for rural practices

Here's what Blake tells other clinics:

"I basically just say, 'Hey, don't you hate notes?' And then: 'How would you feel if 80% of the work was already done?'" — Blake Thompson, FNP

Freed is building new tools every day for clinics like his.

"I appreciate you guys taking the time to actually listen to providers. There are a lot of software companies out there that want to hear what admin has to say. You're actually provider-centered. That's worth everything." — Blake Thompson, FNP

Join Blake and the growing community of small practices who are leaving charts at work.

Try Freed for free or chat with our team.