Tobi Olatunji, a Nigerian physician who knows the stress of working at a busy hospital, set out to ease the burden with artificial intelligence (AI) to stem the tide of paperwork and speed the flow of medical research.
According to an NVIDIA press release, Olatunji was looking for a way to cut through piles of paperwork, as he started his practice, to help physicians see more patients throughout the day.
“I worked at one of West Africa’s largest hospitals, where I would routinely see more than 30 patients a day — it’s a very hard job,” Olatunji said, according to the press release.
Today, Olatunji’s company, Intron Health, which belongs to the NVIDIA Inception program, offers the software to accomplish this.
Earning a master’s degree from the University of San Francisco and a second in computer science from Georgia Tech, Olatunji got a boost from mentors, and when he set out to digitize records for Africa’s hospitals, he spend his off-hours writing code for the program. A pilot test during the COVID-19 pandemic hit turbulence.
“We made a hard decision to invest in natural language processing and speech recognition,” he said, knowing this addition would improve the system.
Olatunji noted that the results of his efforts produced the Transcribe app, which he said can capture dictated messages from a physician with a rate of accuracy of more than 92% and can recognize more than 200 African accents.
Olatunji also set out to produce high-quality audio data, using sound clips of medical terms in a wide range of accents to improve quality, and today it includes more than a million clips from 24 countries, including 13 in Africa.
The app can reduce the amount of time physicians dedicate to paperwork by six times, according to the news release, citing results of a study currently being carried out in hospitals in four African nations.
