The COVID-19 pandemic was undoubtedly a turbulent period, particularly for children, senior citizens and those with comorbidities who struggled with multiple physical and mental health challenges. Consequently, the number of patients requiring urgent care also witnessed an increase.

This had a major impact on public health systems, especially in countries like India where physicians are already stretched beyond their capacity. While patient care is the utmost priority, physicians are also expected to spend time on paperwork and creating medical charts for requisite documentation.

No wonder, physician burnouts have become rather common.

The statistics are proof – according to a 2022 Medscape survey on physician burnout, 60% of the respondents attributed chart-making and keeping a track of patient records as leading factors contributing to the persistent fatigue.

Keeping these critical issues in view, Rustom Lawyer and Shiraz Austin who have over two decades of experience in healthcare, co-founded Augnito – an intuitive and advanced voice AI solution for clinical documentation – in 2020.

In a candid chat with INDIAai, Lawyer tells us more about Augnito, what sets it apart from other scribing platforms and what the future holds for the healthcare platform.

The journey of Augnito

Having pioneered clinical documentation in the UK, with the National Health Service (NHS), Lawyer and Austin were aware of the challenges and potential of the healthcare sector. At the ripe age of 19, Lawyer co-founded Scribetech, a clinical voice solution and disruptive technology provider. He utilised his learnings in the space to help build Augnito along with Austin.

With the support of bright minds from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Indian Institute of Technology Bombay (IIT), and The University of Sheffield, Augnito began its journey as a cloud-based voice recognition software nine years ago.

“The idea, at the time, was to drive operational efficiency for Scribetech’s clinical transcription business. However, we soon realised an acute pain point within the global healthcare industry — the need to digitise electronic medical records and have a seamless and interoperable ecosystem for documentation and data,” explains Lawyer.

The co-founders envisioned a future where every physician’s capabilities were augmented by an AI-based personal assistant. Having extensive experience in healthcare also meant that Augnito’s leadership was adequately equipped to provide the accuracy, compliance, and data security measures that the medical industry requires.

On average, doctors today spend 50% of their working hours on record-keeping (for nurses, it is about 30%). That’s valuable time that could be spent focusing on patient care, clinical research, and personal recuperation.

“Augnito’s infrastructure ensures standardised record-keeping, improves the coordination of patient care, enables better clinical research, enhances data analytics and breakthroughs, and reduces the overall cost of healthcare delivery,” reiterates Lawyer.

All in all, Augnito’s mission is to democratise the use of speech-based technology in healthcare, to attain three main objectives—ease electronic medical records (EMR) adoption and usability, reduce the number of claim rejections by enabling physicians to produce quality at source, and drive patient engagement by facilitating more meaningful encounters and optimised treatments.

Delving deep into the technology

Since Augnito is co-designed by physicians and AI scientists, its real-time speech-to-text software is fully equipped with the entire language of medicine, with support for over 50 medical specialties and sub-specialties.

“Focusing on linguistics, the AI-powered clinical documentation tool can accurately decipher any accent of spoken English. Physicians can even personalise their experience by customising Augnito’s vocabulary to include proper nouns, newly-approved drugs, and personal abbreviations,” adds Lawyer, sharing that the solution also comes with a host of productivity-enhancing features like macros, templates, and voice commands.

Augnito’s natural language processing application programming interfaces (APIs) ensure their solutions work seamlessly with over 75 clinical applications like Cerner, Intelerad, Fujifilm, PaxeraHealth, and many more. They even work flawlessly with common word processors like Microsoft Word.

“It is a testament to the advanced API, software development kit (SDK) and the software hosts, allowing it to voice enable any platform through native Integration,” affirms Lawyer.

Augnito’s product portfolio also includes Ambient Clinical Intelligence—one of its latest offerings that is being piloted at some of the largest hospitals and healthcare enterprises in India. This solution allows doctors to focus solely on patient care.

Using multi-lingual speech recognition and generative AI technology, this application allows physicians to document patient encounters and create structured, EMR-ready data from an unstructured, free-flowing conversation with their patients.

“Physicians can simply switch on the Ambient technology app on their smart device and carry out a regular consultation, completely focused on the patient. The AI transcribes the entire conversation in real-time, with absolute accuracy and generates a structured Subjective, Objective Assessment and Plan (SOAP) note which includes chief complaints, medical history, diagnoses, recommended plan of care, prescriptions, and details of the follow-up appointment, among others,” explains Lawyer.

This data then gets pushed into the EMR system with a simple voice command.

Another popular solution from Augnito’s stable is Spectra, a fast and easy speech-to-text solution that captures patient notes in seconds, increases productivity and improves patient care, and voice services.

“Our developer portal ensures customers can easily evaluate and integrate Augnito’s services. By combining human-centric design and cutting-edge technology, the overarching vision at Augnito is to help institutions establish a strong backbone for a centralised healthcare infrastructure—one that benefits both providers and patients,” says Lawyer.

Augnito offers both on-premises and cloud-based solutions to a mix of enterprise and retail clientele. The team constantly strives for innovation to add value to every level of the spectrum of healthcare— from diagnostic centres and labs to the in-patient department (IPD), out-patient department (OPD), and even pharmacies.

The future

While much is already happening, Augnito has more to offer in the future. Their plan is to use voice biomarkers to identify neurological ailments such as Alzheimer’s, mental health diseases such as depression, and pulmonary diseases such as COVID-19.

“Leveraging over 2500 biomarkers that are present in the sub-language elements of the human voice alone — Augnito envisions a future where you can detect an ailment by simply hearing the patient speak,” says Lawyer.

These biomarkers will essentially work as a diagnostic tool for the AI— scanning for voice patterns in the speech that will help in the detection of disease via a database of linguistic intonations, inflections, cadence, and more.

• Photo by Irwan @blogcious on Unsplash