EkaCare picked by the National Health Authority to build the AI voice scribe for doctors in public hospitals

EkaCare, the Bengaluru based health AI company run by Orbi Health Private Limited, said on 11 November 2026 that the National Health Authority (NHA) has selected it as the technology partner for NHA's Ambient AI enabled Voice Scribe, a tool for doctors in public health facilities under the Ayushman Bharat Digital Mission (ABDM). The Economic Times and PSU Connect reported that the solution will run on NHA infrastructure powered by Amazon Web Services, and YourStory carried the news in its daily startup roundup.

The selection came through an open call. NHA issued an Expression of Interest on 2 September 2026 for open source voice to text tools that capture doctor and patient conversations and turn them into structured, editable health records, according to the ABDM website. The EoI document asked for solutions that can be hosted on MeitY empanelled clouds inside NHA approved infrastructure without vendor lock in. EkaCare said the process included a demonstration before NHA's evaluation committee, and that founder and CEO Vikalp Sahni and AI engineering VP Neha Jagadeesh also showed the system at NHA's national review meeting with states and Union Territories in Kolkata on 5 and 6 November.

In practice the scribe listens to a consultation and prepares a clinical note covering complaints, history, medications, vitals, lab findings, diagnosis and plan, in FHIR, the data format used across ABDM. It supports more than 15 Indian languages, including conversations that mix languages. A verified doctor must review and approve every note before it is saved and linked to the patient's ABHA, the national health ID, and doctors sign in through the Healthcare Professionals Registry. Hospitals can embed it in their existing hospital software, use its own screen, or call it through APIs, and it is designed to run entirely inside NHA's airgapped environment.

The system rests on two pieces EkaCare built in India. Parrotlet-A 2.5 Pro is an open weight speech model published on AIKosh and Hugging Face; the company says it had the lowest error rate of all models tested in a public benchmark of 6,550 real Indian consultations across five languages. Lipi, formerly called Vaarta, is its open source agentic framework for turning conversations into records. EkaCare says its commercial scribe, EkaScribe, is used by more than 1,000 doctors in private practice. The company was founded in December 2020 by Vikalp Sahni and Deepak Tuli, who earlier cofounded Goibibo, TechCrunch reported at its Series A.

What to watch: neither NHA nor the company has disclosed a contract value, the number of facilities or a rollout timeline. The EoI scope covers pilots, integration, training and operations, so the next signal is which states and hospitals switch it on first. The scale is large: the EoI cites 96.76 crore ABHAs and 133.43 crore health records already linked.