This year, four senior radiologists from NM Medical, a diagnostics chain in Mumbai, started using Augnito, an AI-based speech-to-text tool designed to help doctors maintain medical records in a faster and accurate manner. Until now, medical professionals would largely rely on dictation and getting their reports typed by transcriptionists. According to the centre, within three weeks, the turnaround time improved by nearly 60 per cent as the doctors were able to edit and finalise their reports within minutes of going through the study. “Earlier, they would have to proofread the typed reports hours later, when they had already moved on to other cases,” says Rahil Shah, director of NM Medical. He says that it also addressed the sloppy handwriting that doctors are infamous for, and the trouble that others have deciphering it—a 2017 study by South Africa’s National District Hospital, Bloemfontein had found that just 75 per cent of pharmacists could read doctors’ instructions from a sample group.

The tool is the brainchild of entrepreneur Rustom Lawyer. For the past seven years, Lawyer has been researching how he could help healthcare providers with efficient systems for medical reporting. The pandemic only necessitated it. “Doctors end up spending as much time inputting patient data as they do in patient consultation,” he says. “We wanted to address this pain point and ease the effort through an intelligent voice-driven user interface.”