In a pre-seed funding round, Nigerian health tech company, Intron Health, raised $1.6 million. This money will be used to expand the workforce, deepen research and improve cloud-native and on-premises capabilities.
Microtraction led the funding round with Plug and Play Ventures, Jaza Rift Ventures, Octopus Ventures, Africa Health Ventures, OpenseedVC, Pi Campus, Alumni Angel and Baker Bridge Capital as participants. Moreover, Google,CLEAR Global,NYU and Optum which are major world companies were among investors of this round.
Founded by Dr.Tobi Olatunji in 2020 , Intron Health bridges worldwide speech progressions by catering for a variety of African languages and accents. The firm’s interface allows clinicians to enter medical records through speech-to-text conversion thereby cutting down data entry time significantly. Many doctors in various African countries handle high numbers of patients hence this is very critical.
“Having worked as a doctor in Nigeria, I have experienced first-hand the pain points of trying to deliver quality healthcare amidst increasing patient numbers,” Olatunji said. He stressed that data entry was one of the primary bottlenecks hindering adoption of electronic medical records. Intron health platform allows seven times faster complete documentation by doctors thus speeding up development in e-heath implementations.
The technology has shown impressive results already, with an improvement in radiology reporting time from 48 hours to 20 minutes at University College Hospital, Ibadan. TechCabal quoted the words of Olatunji that said, “We are improving efficiency and health outcomes and positively impacting hospital finances.”
Intron Health’s AI transcription tool for speech-to-text is built to accommodate numerous African accents, with datasets consisting of over 3.5 million audio clips across African languages representing 288 accents. A statement by Olatunji was made like this, ”We made algorithms that train how the model responds to dominant and minority accents.”
Additionally, the firm is working on a multilingual speech-to-text product which will enable doctors to communicate with patients who do not speak English. Adding further, Olatunji said “We’ll be deploying the English to Hausa model first in the coming months.”
Oluwatosin Fatade, a Chief Resident at the Radiology Department in Intron Health commended efficiency of technology saying; “We confirmed it was much better for us than voice-to-text available on Android and iPhones. It is refreshing to finally see great technology that helps doctors amidst several challenges facing healthcare in Nigeria.”
At present, Intron Health serves over 30 public and private hospitals with more than 56,000 patients across Nigeria, Ghana, Kenya, South Africa and Uganda. Lately, the company has joined hands with Google Research, Digital Square at PATH – Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s strategic initiative to conduct a large-scale study on language models in global health.
Dayo Koleowo of Microtraction stated that Intron Health’s innovative approach was supported by him by saying; “We value companies and entrepreneurs who push boundaries with innovative solutions. Intron Health exemplifies this spirit.”
As digital health solutions continue to change, they position Intron Health as one of the key players when it comes to addressing the unique challenges faced by African healthcare system in terms of medical documentation and overall healthcare delivery.
