In a significant development for the African healthcare sector, Nigerian AI startup Intron Health has successfully raised $1.6 million in a pre-seed funding round. This infusion of capital is set to propel the company forward, enabling it to expand its team, enhance its research capabilities, and bolster its cloud-native and on-premises solutions.
Founded in 2020 by Dr. Tobi Olatunji, Intron Health offers innovative speech-to-text transcription tools designed specifically for healthcare workers. This technology addresses a critical need, as doctors in many African countries often attend to hundreds of patients daily and are burdened with extensive paperwork. By converting speech into text, Intron Health’s solution significantly reduces the time doctors spend on administrative tasks, allowing them to focus more on patient care. Through voice commands, doctors can efficiently enter medical records, issue prescriptions, and generate patient reports.
Intron Health’s impact has been profound. At the University College Hospital in Ibadan, the startup’s technology has reduced the turnaround time for radiology reporting from 48 hours to just 20 minutes. “We are improving efficiency and health outcomes and positively impacting hospital finances,” Olatunji shared in an interview with TechCabal.
One of the notable challenges for AI applications in Africa is the continent’s diverse linguistic landscape. However, Intron Health’s speech-to-text tool is designed to recognize and process a wide array of African accents. Dr. Olatunji, who has over a decade of experience in deep learning, explained that the company’s datasets include over 3.5 million audio clips across various African languages and 288 different accents. “We developed algorithms that train the model to respond accurately to both dominant and minority accents,” he said.
Intron Health’s web application enables healthcare professionals to seamlessly enter patient data, prescribe medications, and generate reports using voice commands. The company is also developing a multilingual speech-to-text product to assist doctors in communicating with patients who do not understand English. The first deployment of this product will be an English-to-Hausa model, which is expected to roll out in the coming months.
Intron Health operates in a competitive space, facing rivals like Nigeria’s Helium Health and Kenya’s Terragon Health, which offer Electronic Medical Records (EMR) and Hospital Management Information System (HMIS) solutions. However, Dr. Olatunji emphasized that Intron Health seeks collaboration rather than competition. “We are not trying to differentiate ourselves; we are only trying to partner with our competition,” he said. The company provides its speech-to-text software to other EMR businesses, fostering a collaborative ecosystem.
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Currently, Intron Health serves over 56,000 patients across more than 30 public and private hospitals in Nigeria and Kenya, including the University College Hospital in Ibadan, Aminu Kano Teaching Hospital in Kano, Babcock Teaching Hospital in Ogun, and Meridian Health Group in Nairobi.
The successful funding round was led by Microtraction, with participation from notable investors such as Plug and Play Ventures, Jaza Rift Ventures, Octopus Ventures, Africa Health Ventures, OpenseedVC, Pi Campus, Alumni Angel, and Baker Bridge Capital. This financial backing marks a pivotal step in Intron Health’s journey to revolutionize healthcare delivery in Africa through cutting-edge AI technology.