Written by : Dr. Aishwarya Sarthe
January 16, 2025
The integration of United-MedASR into UWC’s mental health platform Stella enhances its conversational AI capabilities, making it a more efficient tool for mental health professionals.
United We Care (UWC), a deep-tech startup, has launched United-MedASR, a Medical Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) model that claims unprecedented accuracy in clinical applications.
The integration of United-MedASR into UWC’s mental health platform Stella enhances its conversational AI capabilities, making it a more efficient tool for mental health professionals.
United-MedASR demonstrates a Word Error Rate (WER) reduction of up to 98% compared to Meta, Nvidia, and Google systems.
This precision, critical in healthcare, minimizes the risks associated with traditional ASR tools, which typically have error rates of 3–5%.
“United-MedASR achieves an industry-leading 0.5% error rate, ensuring accuracy in critical interactions,” stated Ritu Mehrotra, Founder and CEO of United We Care.
The ASR system is designed to understand 29 languages, including regional dialects and thick accents, a feature enabled by training the model on billions of medical tokens.
Mehrotra highlighted, “We have trained our model through over 10 million voice conversations recorded on Stella globally. This training enables it to recognize complex clinical terminology and thick regional accents.”
Stella assists psychiatrists by enabling patients to complete preliminary assessments, such as the GAD-7 test, remotely before their clinical visit.
Additionally, Stella records and summarizes therapists’ session notes, allowing clinicians to focus on patient care.
Moreover, Stella acts as a preclinical tool, providing psychological first aid during anxiety or depression episodes. It can assess the severity of a patient's condition and automatically schedule clinician appointments when necessary.
“Stella’s new capabilities significantly improve both patient and clinician experiences, making mental healthcare more accessible and precise,” Mehrotra added.
Since its 2021 launch, Stella has become a desktop tool for mental health professionals and a companion app for patients.
Legacy Community Health in Texas and other major US hospital networks use Stella. UWC also provides Stella as a corporate employee wellness platform, serving over three million enterprise users globally, including 200,000 in India. Clients include L’Oréal, EY, Bharat Electronics Limited, and SBI Cards.
The integration of United-MedASR positions Stella as a key player in addressing global mental health challenges.
With an annual spending of $500 billion on mental health and wellness, UWC's innovations align with efforts to reduce the economic impact of mental health issues, estimated at $6 trillion annually.