Chennai: Doctors in govt hospitals soon may not have to write or type prescriptions. Ashwin AI, an artificial intelligence-based software developed by IIT Madras startup Plenome, will generate prescriptions and track the health of patients based on the conversations between the doctor and his patients. This AI-based prescription generator won BHASHINI’s all-India AI hackathon and was deployed at AIIMS New Delhi.Through the multilingual AI-based healthcare transcription and service delivery challenge, the team developed voice-to-text technologies that simplified the medical documentation. The software has crossed three stages of evaluation over the last 12 months and won Rs 35 lakh in prize money for piloting it.“Doctors at govt hospitals struggle to take notes or do follow-ups due to high volume of patients. With this software, they can generate prescriptions, send medicines to patients, track their health outcomes and plan for recovery,” said Prabhu Rajagopal, director (in charge), IIT-M Zanzibar campus and founder of Plenome.“We have built very good specifics to understand the medical terminology. The software can cover most of the Indian languages and produce texts with 90% to 95% accuracy,” he added.Anirudh Varna, chief technology officer, Plenome, said the software can support conversations in Indian languages including Hindi, Tamil, Telugu and Gujarati.“The latency is 10 seconds to 12 seconds. Within this time, it can generate the conversation as audio files and generate medical records. We are planning to work with several state govts including Tamil Nadu and Goa to deploy it in govt hospitals,” he added.Ashwin AI is built on a decentralised machine-learning technique where it can be trained across multiple independent data sources without requiring extensive data transfers.The software has generated more than 45,000 prescriptions using AI. Besides AIIMS, it is also being deployed by Apollo Telehealth and NIC-supported hospitals in four locations in the country. Beyond healthcare, Ashwin AI is also being used for energy metering, parole management and voice-based survey report logging.
