When was the last time you ever wrote with pen and paper, or used an old fashioned typewriter? Writers like me have spent our entire careers on desktops, laptops and even smartphones to file stories. Old school novelists now extensively use technologies like Speech-To-Text (STT). So why should doctors be any different? For the unversed, doctors spend around 35% of their time documenting patient data – this includes recording a diagnosis, researching for clinical trials, typing referral letters and the like. Thanks to this meticulous documentation, the medical fraternity worldover has reams of data available to understand diseases better and make better diagnoses.

With the advent and rapid adoption of technologies in healthcare, medical transcription services are also responding positively to the latest developments. Scribetech, a healthcare speech recognition BPO, is one such. Rustom Lawyer, the cofounder and CEO, started the company in 2001, which today offers a range of services including clinical transcription, speech recognition and digital dictation. Scribetech works in partnership with UK’s National Health Service (NHS) as well as Chelsea & Westminster Hospital, University Hospital Birmingham, Kingston University Trust and other independent healthcare organisations. However, Lawyer believed digital technologies could lead to the dawn of a new era in medical transcription, as the conventional technology service sector was prime for disruption.

In addition to running a company, Lawyer has spent a considerable time upskilling with specialized management degrees from Stanford University, MIT and Harvard Business School. While studying at Stanford University a couple of years ago, Lawyer explored the readiness of a market like India for realtime digital medical transcription services. In addition, he also realized that India was at an exciting precipice of acing the strategy for widespread digitization for the masses. This was the Eureka moment for Lawyer to launch Augnito, an AI-based voice recognition platform for the medical industry.

Calling it a ‘blue sky opportunity’ for Indian healthcare, Lawyer began the unique journey of transitioning a BPO to a startup. With funds from his business at Scribetech, Lawyer says they didn’t have to raise any additional capital, and launched Augnito in early 2020 – right when COVID19 was beginning to pick up pace. But this didn’t deter Lawyer, as he was fully prepared and confident with the product. The startup has an esteemed advisory board comprising of Ishaat Hussain, former finance director of Tata Sons and Maciej Kraus, venture investor and lecturer at Stanford; in addition to academicians like Dr. Pushpak Bhattacharya from IIT Bombay and from Sheffield University to augment their R&D efforts.

Augnito is driven by deep learning and speech recognition. It can be easily integrated with existing hospital EMR/PHR/EHR systems and is available on a secure cloud-based infrastructure. The tech team at Augnito showed a demo of the platform to INDIAai, where its features could be assessed and understood real time. Augnito can be downloaded on a desktop through an API and SD cable, and users need to register with a username and password. Once installed, users can start dictating their notes or reports, and the software transcribes it in real-time. The platform also formats and tidies up the reports, to make them more presentable. The two decades spent in medical transcription has provided the Augnito team a detailed understanding of clinical requirements, and this granular data has been fed into the Augnito machine learning platform, making the entire software deeply intuitive. To update medical records, the user has to merely call out the details like patient name, age, gender, medical condition and prescribed medicines, and the software accurately inputs the information in preset columns. There are a variety of templates added to the software for different kinds of reports and specialties too. The app can filter out background noise to accurately record the primary user’s inputs, can identify different accents and even some commonly spoken everyday parlance in languages other than English.

Augnito was launched at Nayah Healthcare in Mathura last year, and since, several suburban hospitals across India have started using this platform including Breach Candy Hospital and Jaslok Hospital in Mumbai, Apollo Hospitals, Medanta Hospital in Delhi and Telerad Solutions in Bangalore. The solution is available in 24 Indian states so far.

Notably, Augnito is now focusing on enhancing its NLP capabilities in Indic languages as it eyes India as a key market, and rural Indian healthcare is where the real potential lies for disruption.