Intron Health, a startup focused on clinical speech recognition, has announced it has secured $1.6 million in seed funding. Founded by Tobi Olatunji, a former doctor trained and practicing in Nigeria, the company was born out of his firsthand experience with the inefficiencies of the healthcare system, including cumbersome paperwork and the challenges of tracking these documents.
Olatunji's interest lies in improving healthcare efficiency. He earned a Master's degree in Medical Informatics from the University of San Francisco and a Master's in Computer Science from Georgia Tech. During his tenure at tech companies, he gained extensive experience in Natural Language Processing (NLP), particularly in the healthcare sector.
Intron Health initially aimed to digitize African hospital operations through Electronic Medical Record (EMR) systems. However, Olatunji discovered that doctors preferred handwriting over typing. This prompted him to explore how to make basic data entry and writing tasks more efficient for doctors.
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Due to the existing speech-to-text technology's issues with African accents and complex medical terminology, Olatunji recognized the need for a speech recognition technology that could recognize African accents. Intron Health's speech recognition tool integrates with existing EMR systems and has been adopted by 30 hospitals across five markets including Kenya and Nigeria.
The technology has led to some immediate positive outcomes. For instance, Intron Health helped one of West Africa's largest hospitals reduce the waiting time for radiology results from 48 hours to 20 minutes. This efficiency is crucial in healthcare delivery, especially in Africa where the doctor-to-patient ratio is among the lowest in the world.
Olatunji noted that hospitals have invested heavily in equipment and technology, making it essential to ensure they effectively utilize these technologies. Intron Health provides value by helping them increase the adoption rate of EMR systems.
Looking ahead, Intron Health is exploring new growth areas with support from various venture capital firms and angel investors including Microtraction, Plug and Play Ventures, Jaza Rift Ventures, Octopus Ventures, Africa Health Ventures, OpenseedVC, Pi Campus, Alumni Angel, and BakerBridge Capital.
Technically, Intron Health is working on improving noise reduction features and ensuring the platform works well even with low bandwidth. Additionally, the company is developing transcription capabilities for multi-speaker conversations and integrating text-to-speech functions.
Olatunji plans to add intelligent systems or decision support tools for tasks like prescribing or lab tests. These tools can help reduce doctor errors, ensure patients receive adequate care, and expedite work processes.
Intron Health is one of the growing number of generative AI startups in the healthcare sector, including Microsoft's DAX Express, which reduces clinical administrative tasks by generating notes in seconds. With the global voice and speech recognition market expected to reach $84.97 billion by 2032, growing at a CAGR of 23.7% from 2024, the market is booming.
In addition to building voice technology, Intron Health plays a crucial role in African voice research. Recently, it collaborated with Google Research, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and PATH's Digital Square to evaluate popular large language models (LLMs) in 15 countries, such as OpenAI's GPT-4o, Google's Gemini, and Anthropic's Claude, to identify the strengths, weaknesses, and risks of bias or harm in LLMs. This is all aimed at ensuring culturally adapted models for African clinics and hospitals.