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IIT Madras Startup Plenome Wins AI Hackathon, Deploys Ashwin AI Prescription Generator at AIIMS New Delhi
A Chennai‑based startup incubated at the Indian Institute of Technology Madras (IIT‑Madras) has won an all‑India artificial‑intelligence hackathon and has begun deploying its voice‑to‑text prescription generator, Ashwin AI, at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) in New Delhi.
According to a report in the Times of India, the team from Plenome won the BHASHINI AksharDrishti hackathon, a competition organized by the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology to encourage multilingual AI solutions. The prize money for the project was Rs 35 lakh, and the software has already passed three stages of evaluation over the past 12 months.
Ashwin AI is designed to capture the conversation between a doctor and a patient and automatically generate a prescription, track the patient’s health outcomes, and help plan recovery. The system can also send medicine orders to pharmacies and record follow‑up data. According to the article, the software can cover most Indian languages and achieves a transcription accuracy of 90 % to 95 %.
Plenome’s director in charge at the IIT‑Madras Zanzibar campus, Prabhu Rajagopal, said the software was built with a focus on medical terminology. “We have built very good specifics to understand the medical terminology,” he explained. “The software can cover most of the Indian languages and produce texts with 90 % to 95 % accuracy.”
Doctors in government hospitals often face high patient volumes that make manual note‑taking and prescription writing time‑consuming. The hackathon’s challenge was to create a system that could reduce this burden. The team’s solution, developed as part of a multilingual AI‑based healthcare transcription and service delivery challenge, simplifies medical documentation by converting spoken dialogue into structured text.
The deployment at AIIMS New Delhi marks the first large‑scale use of the system in a national medical institute. AIIMS is a group of autonomous public medical universities that were established under an act of Parliament and are considered institutes of national importance. The pilot at AIIMS is intended to evaluate the system’s performance in a real‑world clinical environment.
Plenome, which offers a range of solutions including blockchain‑as‑a‑service and telemedicine, is one of several IIT‑Madras‑incubated startups that have attracted attention for applying deep‑tech to public‑sector challenges. The company’s focus on secure and intelligent digital infrastructure for healthcare aligns with the government’s push for digital health solutions.
The project’s success demonstrates the potential of multilingual AI to streamline clinical workflows in India’s public hospitals. While the system’s accuracy and language coverage are promising, the article notes that further validation in diverse clinical settings will be necessary before wider adoption.
In summary, Plenome’s Ashwin AI has won a national AI hackathon, secured prize money, and begun a pilot deployment at AIIMS New Delhi. The system’s voice‑to‑text technology promises to reduce documentation workload for doctors, generate prescriptions automatically, and track patient health outcomes across multiple Indian languages.
The next steps for the startup include scaling the solution to other government hospitals and refining the system based on feedback from clinicians and patients. The outcome of the AIIMS pilot will likely influence future investments and policy decisions regarding AI‑enabled clinical documentation in India.
According to a report in the Times of India, the team from Plenome won the BHASHINI AksharDrishti hackathon, a competition organized by the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology to encourage multilingual AI solutions. The prize money for the project was Rs 35 lakh, and the software has already passed three stages of evaluation over the past 12 months.
Ashwin AI is designed to capture the conversation between a doctor and a patient and automatically generate a prescription, track the patient’s health outcomes, and help plan recovery. The system can also send medicine orders to pharmacies and record follow‑up data. According to the article, the software can cover most Indian languages and achieves a transcription accuracy of 90 % to 95 %.
Plenome’s director in charge at the IIT‑Madras Zanzibar campus, Prabhu Rajagopal, said the software was built with a focus on medical terminology. “We have built very good specifics to understand the medical terminology,” he explained. “The software can cover most of the Indian languages and produce texts with 90 % to 95 % accuracy.”
Doctors in government hospitals often face high patient volumes that make manual note‑taking and prescription writing time‑consuming. The hackathon’s challenge was to create a system that could reduce this burden. The team’s solution, developed as part of a multilingual AI‑based healthcare transcription and service delivery challenge, simplifies medical documentation by converting spoken dialogue into structured text.
The deployment at AIIMS New Delhi marks the first large‑scale use of the system in a national medical institute. AIIMS is a group of autonomous public medical universities that were established under an act of Parliament and are considered institutes of national importance. The pilot at AIIMS is intended to evaluate the system’s performance in a real‑world clinical environment.
Plenome, which offers a range of solutions including blockchain‑as‑a‑service and telemedicine, is one of several IIT‑Madras‑incubated startups that have attracted attention for applying deep‑tech to public‑sector challenges. The company’s focus on secure and intelligent digital infrastructure for healthcare aligns with the government’s push for digital health solutions.
The project’s success demonstrates the potential of multilingual AI to streamline clinical workflows in India’s public hospitals. While the system’s accuracy and language coverage are promising, the article notes that further validation in diverse clinical settings will be necessary before wider adoption.
In summary, Plenome’s Ashwin AI has won a national AI hackathon, secured prize money, and begun a pilot deployment at AIIMS New Delhi. The system’s voice‑to‑text technology promises to reduce documentation workload for doctors, generate prescriptions automatically, and track patient health outcomes across multiple Indian languages.
The next steps for the startup include scaling the solution to other government hospitals and refining the system based on feedback from clinicians and patients. The outcome of the AIIMS pilot will likely influence future investments and policy decisions regarding AI‑enabled clinical documentation in India.
