The National Health Authority (NHA) has selected Bengaluru-based health AI startup EkaCare as a technology partner for its ambient AI-enabled Voice Scribe solution, which aims to reduce documentation for doctors in public health facilities.
“With the Voice Scribe, a doctor can speak with the patient in the language they are comfortable in, and a structured clinical note is ready for review when the consultation ends,” Bhaskar Chaudhary, Chief Product Officer at EkaCare, said in a statement.
The system listens to doctor-patient consultations and generates structured clinical notes covering complaints, medical history, medications, vital signs, laboratory findings, diagnosis and treatment plans. The notes follow speciality-specific templates and are generated in Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources format.
The solution will convert doctor-patient conversations into structured clinical notes under the Ayushman Bharat Digital Mission. It will run on NHA infrastructure powered by Amazon Web Services, the company announced.
The Voice Scribe uses two technologies developed by EkaCare: Parrotlet-A 2.5 Pro, an open-weight speech model designed for Indian healthcare conversations, and Lipi, an open-source agentic harness previously known as Vaarta.
The company said in a benchmark involving 6,550 real Indian consultations, Parrotlet-A 2.5 Pro recorded the lowest error rate among the models tested across all five benchmarked languages, according to EkaCare.
Meanwhile, Lipi converts conversations, ranging from meetings to medical consultations, into structured records. The electronic medical record component of the Voice Scribe is built on the framework, which developers, hospitals and researchers can use, adapt, and contribute to, the company said.
EkaCare, operated by Orbi Health Private Limited, was selected through NHA’s Expression of Interest process for open-source ambient AI-enabled voice-to-text solutions for digital health record creation. The selection included a demonstration before NHA’s Evaluation Committee.
According to the company, the solution supports more than 15 Indian languages, including conversations in which speakers switch between languages. Its speech model has been benchmarked across Indian English, Hindi, Marathi, Kannada, and Telugu.
EkaCare said that doctors remain responsible for approving the generated records. Each note must be reviewed, edited if necessary, and approved by a verified doctor before it is saved and linked to the patient’s Ayushman Bharat Health Account. Doctors accessing the solution through its standalone interface will authenticate through the Healthcare Professionals Registry.
The company said that public hospitals can integrate the Voice Scribe into their existing hospital management information systems through an embedded mode. The solution is also available through a standalone interface and APIs based on the open MedScribe Alliance standard for medical scribes.
EkaCare said the system is designed to operate entirely within NHA’s air-gapped secure environment, allowing public health facilities to retain control over their health data.
The partnership builds on EkaCare’s existing ambient medical scribe product, EkaScribe, which the company says is used by more than 1,000 doctors in private practice.
