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Intron Health, a pioneering well being tech firm that gives scientific speech recognition for over 200 accents spoken in creating nations, beginning in Africa, has raised $1.6M in a pre-seed funding spherical. The spherical 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. The funding additionally noticed contributions from angel buyers from world corporations, together with Google, CLEAR Global, NYU, and Optum.
With this funding, Intron Well being will deepen its analysis efforts, strengthen cloud-native and on-prem capabilities, and develop distribution. The corporate may also bolster its staff by recruiting tech expertise to help product growth and market growth, driving continued progress and breaking additional technological boundaries.
Voice know-how has superior quickly globally and now performs a pivotal function in numerous industries– automating name centre operations, producing social media content material, biometric verification, voice bots for psychological well being and affected person schooling, and eliminating a number of hours of scientific documentation via ambient listening. Productiveness instruments equivalent to scientific computerized speech recognition (ASR) are ubiquitous in developed markets. Nevertheless, with over 3,000 of the world’s estimated 7,000 languages and dialects in Africa, many African and minority languages and accents stay excluded from world speech developments. Intron Well being’s superior speech recognition platform is bridging this hole by supporting a various vary of African languages, accents, recognising native names and precisely transcribing medical terminologies on-line and offline.
Launched in 2020 to digitise healthcare, Intron Founder, Tobi Olatunji, shortly recognised information entry was an enormous bottleneck to digital medical document adoption. Heavy affected person visitors meant hundreds of keystrokes per day, growing documentation time and affected person wait time, with docs typically spending over six hours a day on paperwork. The numerous further workload made digitization impractical for already overworked clinicians. To fight these inefficiencies, Intron developed Africa’s first scientific speech recognition platform, which boasts as much as 92% accuracy fee on medical terminology with heavy accents. This platform helps docs throughout Nigeria, Ghana, Kenya, South Africa and most not too long ago Uganda full documentation seven occasions quicker, considerably accelerating the adoption of Digital Well being Data (EHR) and lowering the executive burden.
Talking on the spherical, Tobi Olatunji, Founder and CEO of Intron Well being acknowledged, ‘Having labored as a physician in Nigeria, I’ve skilled first-hand the ache factors with attempting to ship high quality healthcare amidst growing affected person numbers. We’re excited concerning the adoption and progress we’ve seen over the previous yr, which reveals we’re addressing a big want and offering a properly overdue answer to a important drawback within the world south. We aren’t solely enhancing effectivity but in addition enhancing well being outcomes and positively impacting hospital funds. With the backing of outstanding world buyers who deliver deep data and experience, we’re trying ahead to our subsequent section of progress.’
At West Africa’s largest Hospital, the College of Faculty Hospital, Ibadan, the corporate considerably alleviated the workload of healthcare practitioners, lowering radiology reporting turnaround time from 48 hours to simply 20 minutes. Talking on the impression on operational effectivity and affected person care, the Chief Resident on the Radiology Division, Dr Oluwatosin Fatade, recommended the know-how’s capability to scale back back-and-forth from a number of report evaluations, in the end reducing affected person wait time. “We confirmed it was significantly better for us than voice-to-text out there on Android and iPhones. It’s refreshing to lastly see nice know-how that helps docs amidst a number of challenges dealing with healthcare in Nigeria”. Intron Well being now serves over 30 private and non-private hospitals together with Aminu Kano Instructing Hospital (AKTH) Kano, Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu Hospital (ABATH) Lagos, Babcock Instructing Hospital Ogun, and Meridian Well being Group Nairobi, offering care to greater than 56,000 sufferers.
Dayo Koleowo, Companion at Microtraction, shared, “We worth corporations and entrepreneurs who push boundaries with progressive options. Intron Well being exemplifies this spirit. Tobi and Olakunle have successfully mixed their area experience, distinctive insights, and confirmed execution expertise to realize spectacular traction. We’re excited to help Intron Well being additional and assured of their capability to ship vital worth to the healthcare sector and its stakeholders.”
To unravel the large drawback with numerous accents and languages, Intron Well being created Africa’s largest scientific speech dataset, a proprietary warchest of over 3.5 million audio clips throughout a number of specialties and domains, protecting 288 accents from over 18,000 contributors from 29 nations. This huge dataset has enabled the corporate to coach its algorithms for deployment in any hospital with minimal further mannequin fine-tuning. Accessible through any gadget via a browser, Intron Well being’s speech-to-text real-time AI transcription converts spoken data into textual content permitting healthcare suppliers to simply enter information into digital medical information, saving time and enhancing productiveness.
Leveraging its humongous African information contributor base, Intron Well being not too long ago partnered with Google Analysis, the Invoice & Melinda Gates Basis, and Digital Sq. at PATH on the biggest examine on LLMs in World well being evaluating 20+ LLMS (like OpenAI’s GPT-4o, Google’s Gemini, and Anthropic’s Claude) on 32 medical specialties throughout 15 nations. The mission, tagged AfriMed-QA, creates a pan-African multispecialty benchmark dataset of 20,000 A number of Alternative Questions (MCQs), Brief Reply Questions (SAQs) and Shopper Questions for Medical Query-Answering (QA).
Contributed by over 1,000 clinicians throughout 15 nations, this initiative will determine strengths, weaknesses, and dangers of bias or hurt in LLMs, and fine-tune culturally attuned fashions to be used in African clinics. The corporate has additionally partnered with business leaders equivalent to NVIDIA and Huggingface to boost its know-how. As a member of the Commonwealth Artificial Intelligence Consortium (CAIC) initiated by the Commonwealth Secretary Basic, Rt Hon Patricia Scotland KC, Intron will assist lengthen cutting-edge AI applied sciences to Commonwealth Small States.
Intron Well being’s speech recognition answer is proving transformative even past healthcare and the corporate is eager to discover potential use instances and alternatives for the transformative energy of localised voice know-how in and past Africa.
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