Intron Health has raised $1.6 million to improve healthcare systems in Africa.
Tobi Olatunji launched the clinical speech recognition company in 2020, inspired by his experience as a medical doctor in Nigeria. He recognized several shortcomings in the healthcare system, such as the influx of paperwork doctors are required to complete and difficulties in keeping track of the forms, TechCrunch reports.
“I’m always asking, how can we do things better? How can we make life easier for doctors? Can we take some tasks away and offload them to another system so that the doctor can spend their time doing things that are very valuable?” he told the outlet.
These questions did not escape his mind, even after he moved to the United States to obtain a master’s degree in medical informatics from the University of San Francisco and in computer science at Georgia Tech.
Olatunji then worked as a machine learning scientist at Amazon Web Services (AWS) and as a researcher at Enlitic, a healthcare-focused data analytics company. In both roles, his focus centered on natural language processing in healthcare.
Fast-forward to launching Intron Health, his original intent was to digitize operations through an electronic medical record (EMR) system, according to TechCrunch. Then, he decided to get down to basics and improve physicians’ data entry. However, he recognized a stumbling block: the speech recognition technology did not produce accurate results when interacting with African accents or complex medical terms.
Thus, Intron Health launched its speech-recognition technology that recognizes African accents and integrates with existing EMRs.
Intron Health is now closing the healthcare divide in Africa with its algorithm, trained on 3.5 million audio clips that include 288 accents from 18,000 contributors across 29 countries. It now ensures greater accuracy in the speech recognition technology used for electronic medical records, per TechCrunch.
“Because we’ve already trained on many African accents, it’s very likely that the baseline performance of their access will be much better than any other service they use,” Olatunji told the outlet.
“Hospitals have already spent so much on equipment and technology…Ensuring that they apply these tech is important. We’re able to provide value to help them improve the adoption of the EMR system,” Olatunji explained to TechCrunch.
Intron Health has already serviced 30 hospitals in five African markets, including Kenya and Nigeria, the outlet reported. The company is looking to scale its reach thanks to $1.6 million in a pre-seed round led by Microtraction. Plug and Play Ventures, Jaza Rift Ventures, Octopus Ventures, Africa Health Ventures, OpenseedVC, Pi Campus, Alumni Angel, Baker Bridge Capital, and several angel investors also participated in the round.
“Hospitals have already spent so much on equipment and technology… We’re able to provide value to help them improve the adoption of the EMR system,” Olatunji said.
