The National Health Authority (NHA) has selected Bengaluru-based EkaCare (Orbi Health Private Limited) as technology partner for its Ambient AI-enabled Voice Scribe under the Ayushman Bharat Digital Mission (ABDM), the company said on 11 November 2026. The tool turns doctor-patient conversations in more than 15 Indian languages into structured clinical notes and will run on NHA infrastructure powered by Amazon Web Services (AWS).

The selection takes India’s home-grown AI push into everyday public healthcare and fits the government’s wider plan, reported this week, to prioritise indigenous AI models in critical sectors where data sovereignty matters.

How EkaCare won the NHA AI voice scribe role

EkaCare was chosen through the NHA’s Expression of Interest for open-source ambient AI voice-to-text solutions for digital health record creation, which the authority issued on 2 September 2026. The process included a live demonstration before the NHA Evaluation Committee.

The company also showed the scribe at the NHA’s National Review Meeting with states and Union Territories in Kolkata on 5 and 6 November 2026. Founder and CEO Vikalp Sahni and Neha Jagadeesh, VP of AI Engineering, presented the open-source model and agentic harness behind it.

What the voice scribe does for doctors

Much of what is said in India’s busy public clinics never reaches a record. The scribe listens during the consultation and has a draft note ready when it ends.

• Languages: more than 15 Indian languages, including code-mixed conversations, with benchmarks in Indian English, Hindi, Marathi, Kannada and Telugu.
• Structured notes: complaints, history, medications, vitals, lab findings, diagnosis and plan, using speciality templates and the FHIR standard used across ABDM.
• Doctor in control: a verified doctor reviews, edits and approves each note before it is saved and linked to the patient’s ABHA.
• Easy integration: an embedded mode for hospital management information systems (HMIS), a standalone screen with Healthcare Professionals Registry (HPR) sign-in, and APIs based on the open MedScribe Alliance standard.

The system is designed to run fully inside the NHA’s air-gapped secure environment, so patient data stays under public control.

Why open, Indian-built speech AI matters

The scribe runs on two technologies EkaCare built in India. Parrotlet-A 2.5 Pro is an open-weight medical speech model whose weights are published on Hugging Face and AIKosh. EkaCare says it recorded the lowest error rate in all five benchmarked languages in a public test of 6,550 real Indian consultations. Lipi, formerly called Vaarta, is the open-source agentic harness that turns conversations into structured records.

Code-mixed speech has long been the weak point for global speech tools in India, which is why models such as Gnani AI’s Prisma v3 for code-mixed calls have drawn enterprise interest.

“Doctors should be able to give their full attention to the patient, not to a keyboard,” said Bhaskar Chaudhary, Chief Product Officer, EkaCare. He said Parrotlet-A and Lipi “were built in India, for the way India speaks”.

The public-sector scribe builds on EkaScribe, the company’s ambient medical scribe, which more than 1,000 doctors already use in private practice.

What it means for health CIOs

For hospital technology leaders, the deal points to a model where government supplies shared, sovereign AI infrastructure and hospitals plug it into the systems they already run. It joins other public health AI efforts, such as the IndiaAI and ICMR partnership on ethical AI in healthcare and Froncort.AI’s AI-led TB screening.

Rollout dates, the number of facilities and the commercial terms have not been disclosed.

Key takeaways

• The NHA picked EkaCare as technology partner for its ABDM Ambient AI Voice Scribe, announced on 11 November 2026.
• The scribe supports 15+ Indian languages, produces FHIR notes and needs a doctor’s approval before linking to ABHA.
• It runs on NHA’s air-gapped AWS-powered infrastructure using EkaCare’s open Parrotlet-A model and Lipi harness.

FAQ

What is the NHA AI voice scribe?

It is an ambient AI tool for doctors in public health facilities under ABDM that listens to consultations and drafts structured clinical notes for the doctor to review and approve.

Is patient data sent outside the government system?

No. The scribe is designed to run entirely within the NHA’s own air-gapped environment, and notes are linked to a patient’s ABHA only after a verified doctor approves them.

Featured image: EkaCare office reception in Bengaluru. Photo: EkaCare (press handout)

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