Company leader
Rustom Lawyer
Co-founder and CEO
Augnito
Rustom Lawyer is the co-founder and chief executive of Augnito, a Mumbai, India, company that makes voice dictation and ambient AI scribe software for hospitals and clinicians.
Transcription for the NHS
"I have always been passionate about healthcare technology, a journey that began when I co-founded Scribetech in the UK at the age of 19", he said. Scribetech launched in 2004 as the UK's first medical transcription outsourcing business and became a major supplier of clinical transcription to the National Health Service.
Over the next decade the business moved from typing up recordings toward software. It launched a digital dictation workflow product in 2010, worked with professors from MIT on clinical speech recognition in 2012, and ran research with Sheffield University and IIT Bombay from 2015 to automate more of the work. In 2016 it added medical billing services in the UAE.
Starting Augnito
In 2020 Lawyer and his longtime partner Shiraz Austin turned that experience into Augnito, a voice AI company. "The idea for Augnito emerged from a clear pain point in the healthcare industry: the excessive time clinicians spend on documentation", he said.
Augnito's first product, Spectra, lets clinicians dictate notes and reports into hospital record systems with no voice training. Omni followed, an ambient scribe that drafts notes from conversations in more than 37 languages, with tools that check documentation and suggest billing codes.
Building Across Markets
Under Lawyer, Augnito has grown to serve more than 500 hospitals and 15,000 clinicians, with customers in India, the UK and the Middle East, and offers both cloud and on-premises hosting for hospitals with data rules. "Seeing doctors save hours each day and use that time to enhance patient care is incredibly rewarding", he said.