Dr Martins, A Busy Private Clinic And The Patient Who Almost Died From A Heart Attack
“In all that you do, give it your best”—a mantra Dr Martin’s lived by.
Known for his wholeheartedness and skill, Dr Martins always found it a tad difficult to distinguish between late hours at night and the break of dawn.
He would work late into the night with only one thought: how do I give the best care to my patients?
One of the perks of his job was the luxury of time that he could not afford.
A regular day for Dr. Martins meant consultations, paperwork, and emergency calls.
Most days, he wished he could give an arm and a leg for some time.
Being the only physician in his small private practice, he was always overwhelmed with many cases to handle daily.
The repercussion of the lack of this luxury, which he could barely afford but desperately needed, would come knocking when, on what seemed to be a regular day at the office, a patient in her late 60s walked into his office.
Her symptoms were not strange for someone her age. He thought to himself as he listened while she described her condition— “just another regular day”.
He recommended several tests for her and assured her not to worry.
“It possibly could be the stress at the market,” he briskly advised as his mind ran through his upcoming meetings, patient result reviews and appointments.
A few days later, an emergency call was made to the hospital; apparently, the same elderly woman he saw a few days earlier had collapsed in her home from a heart attack and was rushed in by her husband.
Her sight sent shockwaves down his spine!
His heart sank when he glanced at his notes on the test results he recommended when he saw her some days back.
A tiny error!
In the rush of his packed schedule, he had missed noting that a certain protein in her cardiac biomarker was elevated and that, coupled with her risk factors, she was at risk of a heart attack.
He thought he had everything under his watchful physician’s eye.
Well, how would he have seen the details when he had over 30 patients to see daily and had to examine and study a lot of tests and patient records?
What made it more tiring was that he had to spend so much time typing and never really had enough time to see patients and connect the dots that could draw the line between life and death!
That minor omission had almost cost him the patient’s life.
He felt so disappointed and vowed to ensure he gave quality time to thoroughly examine patient results.
She was successfully resuscitated and was referred to a tertiary institution that had the facility to care for her.
Noble of him, I hear you say?
Well, although that might be true, I want you to take a minute and ponder this question.
Would the diligent Dr. Martins, with years of successful patient care under his sleeve, have made such an error if he had enough time to attend to his patients in the first place?
It is concerning to know that most healthcare professionals have encountered one form of professional omission due to a lack of ample time to assess their patients properly.
Creating measures and implementing ways to give healthcare professionals more time to attend to their patients in a place like Africa, where they are naturally overwhelmed, should be a top priority in Africa’s healthcare ecosystem.
To solve this enormous need, Intron Health has developed an innovative solution that has proven to give healthcare professionals more time to spend with their patients.
A Breath Of Fresh Air
“Software should not kill clinical productivity.”
Leveraging speech recognition technologies is one essential way to ensure more time is available to healthcare professionals, especially those in the clinical environment who interact with patients regularly.
How? You may ask.
It’s really simple: Speech Recognition Technology (SRT) recognises individual spoken word signals through a microphone and subsequently processes the user’s words into digital text through a computer.
Speech recognition, also known as voice recognition or speech-to-text, is a technological development that converts spoken language into written text.
Its two main time-saving benefits are:
- Enhancing task efficiency and
- Increasing accessibility for everyone, including individuals with physical impairments.
Speech recognition technology has made writing much easier and faster. Using voice recognition to take notes and dictate patient result reviews is a huge time saver.
Intron Health, a pioneering AI health startup in Nigeria, has achieved a groundbreaking milestone in Africa’s history.
The startup has successfully developed an algorithm that is capable of accurately transcribing a Physician’s dictated messages with an impressive precision of over 92%.
What sets this achievement apart is its ability to accurately transcribe more than 200 diverse African accents!
According to an ongoing study Intron is conducting across hospitals in four African countries, this means slashing the time they spend on paperwork by 7X on average!
The app captures sound bites of medical terms spoken in different accents.
Most clinicians (9 out of 10) felt that using speech recognition, compared to handwriting and typing, saved time, improved the quality of the notes, increased communication speed with others and gave them more time to spend with their patients.
Intron Health Stands Out
“Welcome to the future of clinical documentation with real-time clinical speech-to-text for 200+ African accents.”
Founded in 2020 by Dr. Tobi Olatunji, a physician turned machine learning scientist focused on clinical natural language processing (NLP), Intron, Africa’s first speech-powered medical record, is accelerating the transition to digitised care for clinicians of all typing speeds.
“I worked at one of West Africa’s largest hospitals, where I routinely see more than 30 patients daily—it’s a very hard job. Writing detailed patient notes and filling out forms makes it even harder. Paper records slowed the pace of medical research, too,” said Dr. Tobi Olatunji.
In his first years of practice, he imagined a program to help him navigate the mounds of paperwork, allowing doctors to help more patients.
Intron Health provides clinical speech recognition for over 200 accents in Africa.
It also provides a 7X documentation speedup and frees time so overworked doctors can spend more time with patients—just what Dr. Martins envisioned.
This speech recognition technology can translate spoken words into text using closed captions.
Speech recognition can also enable those with limited hand use to work with computers using voice commands instead of typing.
In healthcare, speech recognition software helps ensure medical records are complete and accurate, thus reducing the chances of missed diagnoses or poor treatment plans.
All Round Electronic Health Record Services
“Intron Health’s speech-to-text technology is revolutionising the design of Electronic Health Records in Africa.”
Intron Health isn’t just about speech recognition; it also has a robust electronic health record service.
Intron Health’s speech recognition technology gives It a big advantage over other EHR providers in Africa.
“Intron is Africa’s largest clinical speech database, with its algorithm trained on 3.5 million audio clips (16,000 hours) from over 18,000 contributors, mainly healthcare practitioners, representing 29 countries and 288 accents,” claims Olatunji, who is undoubtedly building one of the most sophisticated and efficient EHR systems in Africa.
Africa needs to start building tailored digital health technologies for our specific population.
Innovators in Africa must incorporate Africa’s unique language and culture when building digital health solutions.
Intron Health discovered a massive gap in clinical documentation in Africa.
What they are doing might not be entirely novel.
They have just modified an existing solution to fit an emerging market with a great need for it.
The clinical speech-to-text algorithm technologies in the market were not built for providers in Africa but were designed for people with different accents.
So, Intron Health just built one for African doctors who had different accents from those in Western countries or other regions of the world.
What Intron Health has done for medical doctors can be replicated to serve other patient-facing clinicians or healthcare professionals in Africa who need more time to attend to patients but have found themselves captured by the same technology designed to make their work easier.
Competitive Advantages
Intron Health isn’t the only speech recognition brand in the digital health ecosystem.
There are a plethora of similar technologies and products.
But here are the features that put Intron Health miles ahead of their competitors:
- Other voice technologies struggle with thick African accents. Most speech-to-text systems are developed for users in the West and work poorly for African accents, leading to numerous mistakes and errors. Intron supports over 200 African accents.
- Other speech recognition technologies struggle with complex African names; some do not even recognise names like Ayinla, Adeyunma, Emeka, Rukaiyat or other African names. Intron is designed to accurately recognise various complex African names.
- Conventional voice recognition technologies are not tailored to handle intricate medical terminology and abbreviations. The amalgamation of specialised medical jargon and distinct African accents poses significant challenges for other speech-to-text tools such as Cortana. In contrast, Intron has been specifically developed to accurately transcribe complex medical terminology, even in the presence of thick accents.
- Other voice technologies are dead without the Internet: most speech-to-text systems require constant Internet access. Intron can deploy offline.
Intron’s Health Electronic Health Record solution offers the following software solutions:
- Laboratory Services: Easily input laboratory results, records and reports that can be accessible across multiple platforms with inbuilt reference range support.
- Radiology Services: Upload radiological images, reports and associated data.
- Pharmacy Services: Inventory management, e-prescription, overdose flags, and drug administration portals.
- Inpatient/Outpatient Nursing Services: Nursing workbench, vital signs, nursing process and assessment.
- Appointments: Flexible online appointment booking, payment and confirmation.
- Electronic payments: Convenient patient and caregiver payment options- SMS/USSD, Card, Cash, Transfer, HMO, NHIS- from anywhere in the world.
- Revenue Dashboard: Track revenue in real time, reveal trends, and visualise data for each revenue channel.
- Patient Alerts: Get patients involved in care with mobile alerts for important events.
In addition, it also offers:
- Telehealth Services.
- HMO Claims Management.
- Fully Managed Hardware Provision + Servicing.
Partners & Funding
Supported by global companies like Google and Nvidia, with strong local support from companies like DSN, LANAFRICA and a host of other technology heavyweights, Intron Health is set to do great things in Africa’s healthcare ecosystem.
Intron Health Secures Financing To Continue Building And Expanding
It is undeniable that finance plays an important role in expanding a startup’s dreams.
Intron Health recently completed a pre-seed investment round, raising $1.6 million led by Microtraction, with participation from Plug and Play Ventures, Jaza Rift Ventures, Octopus Ventures, Africa Health Ventures, OpenseedVC, Pi Campus, Alumni Angel, BakerBridge Capital and several angel investors.
With the additional funding, the startup aims to expand its workforce, enhance its research, and bolster its on-premises and cloud-native capabilities.
With sufficient funds directed toward this revolution, the future potential of the African health system is limitless.
The Future
According to Olatunji, the future plan is to add intelligence systems or decision-support tools to help doctors with tasks such as prescriptions or lab tests.
These AI-powered tools can help with repetitive and monotonous tasks, reduce prescription errors, improve workflow, and improve overall clinical efficiency.
Intron Health joins the ranks of Microsoft DAX Express and is among a growing number of generative AI startups using AI-powered tools to augment clinical and administrative tasks.
According to Fortune Business Insights, the global speech-and-voice recognition market is projected to be valued at $84.97 billion by 2032, following a CAGR of 23.7% from 2024.
This shows that there’s a large market waiting to be explored, and healthcare innovators must be able to leverage this growth to develop solutions to solve pressing healthcare challenges, especially in Africa.
Intron is building the future of advanced clinical documentation in Africa and laying the foundation for the use of artificial intelligence in Africa’s healthcare ecosystem through strategic partnerships with Google Research, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and Digital Square PATH to evaluate popular large language models (LLMs) like OpenAI’s GPT-4o, Google’s Gemini, and Athropic’s Claude across 15 African countries.
These strategic future-focused partnerships are positioned to help researchers and innovators identify strengths, weaknesses, and risks of bias caused by a lack of representation in the training of LLMs, creating a well-balanced future of AI in healthcare with culturally attuned AI models.
Final Thoughts
Africa is ripe for disruptions in how healthcare is practised and delivered.
Most of the innovations we will be seeing in Africa’s healthcare ecosystem may just be intelligent reiterations and adaptations of digital health solutions in advanced countries.
Innovators need to study what has been done in advanced and developed countries and create specific models that consider Africa’s unique culture and environment like what Dr Olatunji is doing with Intron Health.
At Care City, we’re excited to join the revolution and contribute by sharing these stories to inspire you to do more.
