Intron Health, a Nigeria AI company that provides speech-to-text transcription tools for healthcare workers, has raised $1.6 million in a pre-seed funding round. The startup will use the capital injection to hire more employees, deepen its research efforts, and strengthen its cloud-native and on-prem capabilities.
Launched in 2020 by Dr Tobi Olatunji, Intron Health helps healthcare professionals enter medical records by converting speech into text. This solution is important because doctors in many African countries attend to hundreds of patients daily and have a lot of paperwork to deal with. Intron Health cuts the time doctors spend on writing a patient’s diagnosis through its product. Doctors can enter patients’ medical records, and generate patient reports by voice commands.
Intron Health claims it has helped reduce the turnaround time for radiology reporting at the University of College Hospital, Ibadan, from 48 hours to 20 minutes.
“We are improving efficiency and health outcomes and positively impacting hospital finances,” Olatunji told TechCabal.
While AI’s application on the continent has been affected by inadequate data, Intron Health’s speech-to-text AI transcription tool accounts for many African accents. Olatunji, who has over a decade of deep learning experience, says the datasets are trained on over 3.5 million audio clips across African languages (288 accents).
“We made algorithms that train how the model responds to dominant and minority accents.”
Intron Health is working on a multilingual speech-to-text product to help doctors communicate with patients who don’t understand English. “We’ll be deploying the English to Hausa model first in the coming months,” Olatunji said.
Intron Health competes with Helium Health (Nigeria) and Terragon Health (Kenya), which provide Electronic Medical Records and Hospital Management Information System (EMR/HMIS) solutions.
“We are not trying to differentiate ourselves, we are only trying to partner with our competition,” Olatunji said. Intron Health offers its speech-to-text recognition software to other electronic medical record businesses.
The company cares for more than 56,000 patients currently across its partners with over 30 public and private hospitals across Nigeria and Kenya—including the University of College Hospital, Ibadan, Aminu Kano Teaching Hospital (AKTH) Kano, Babcock Teaching Hospital Ogun, and Meridian Health Group Nairobi.
Its seed round was led by Microtraction, with participation from Plug and Play Ventures, Jaza Rift Ventures, Octopus Ventures, Africa Health Ventures, OpenseedVC, Pi Campus, Alumni Angel, and Baker Bridge Capital.
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