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Intron Health Secures $1.6m to Boost African Speech Recognition
Intron Health, a health tech company, has raised $1.6m in pre-seed to improve African speech recognition.
This will help the company develop its clinical speech recognition platform further, designed for the African linguistic landscape with over 200 accents.
The round was led by Microtraction with participation from Plug and Play Ventures, Jaza Rift Ventures, and angel investors from Google and Optum.
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Table of contents
Healthcare in Africa
Founded in 2020 by Tobi Olatunji, Intron Health found a huge gap in African healthcare: the data entry bottleneck in electronic medical records (EMRs).
The company’s speech recognition technology is to help healthcare professionals reduce the administrative work, so they can document patient information up to 7 times faster than traditional methods.
This is important in countries like Nigeria, Ghana, Kenya, South Africa and Uganda where high patient volumes means long documentation times and patients waiting longer.
The platform has an accuracy of up to 92% in transcribing medical terminology even with heavy accents.
This is important so healthcare providers can communicate and document patient care without the frustration of language barriers.
Impact on Healthcare Institutions
Intron Health’s technology has already made a big impact on several healthcare institutions.
University College Hospital Ibadan has seen a massive reduction in report turnaround time from 48 hours to 20 minutes after implementing this speech recognition platform.
Dr. Oluwatosin Fatade, Chief Resident at the Radiology Department said it has helped doctors navigate the challenges of the healthcare system in Nigeria.
Intron Health currently serves over 30 public and private hospitals including Aminu Kano Teaching Hospital and Meridian Health Group in Nairobi, with over 56,000 patients.
This wide reach is a testament to the platform’s effectiveness and the need for such solutions in African healthcare.
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Building a Speech Dataset
To make its speech recognition technology effective, Intron Health has built Africa’s largest clinical speech dataset with over 3.5 million audio clips.
This dataset has contributions from over 18,000 people across 29 countries.
This allows the company to train its algorithms well and requires minimal fine tuning for deployment in different healthcare settings.
The platform is device agnostic so healthcare providers can easily integrate it into their existing workflow.
Future Prospects and Innovation
As Intron Health gets $1.6M for African speech recognition, it is set to grow big. The funding will help the company to scale its R&D and hire tech talent to support product development and market expansion.
Intron Health is also exploring other use cases for its voice technology outside of healthcare, so it can apply its innovation across different sectors in Africa.
Intron Health’s Managing Director, Tobi Olatunji said “We are solving a big problem and a global problem”.
With partnerships and innovation, Intron Health will disrupt healthcare in Africa and beyond and make healthcare more efficient and accessible for all.
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