How a startup called Augmedix, which has raised over $36M, is enabling hundreds of doctors in the US to use Google Glass for remote medical scribing
PALO ALTO, Calif. — Jim Andrews is in a medical office wearing just a hospital gown, staring at his doctor of 11 years … Tweets: @tom_weaver , @erictopol , @geofutures and @cpmcinsf Tweets: Tom Weaver / @tom_weaver : “Today, 500 doctors in 27 states wear Google Glass... live-streaming to virtual scribes.” https://www.washingtonpost.com/ ... Eric Topol / @erictopol : Redux of @Google glass, “low cost scribes” A1 @Washingtonpost https://www.washingtonpost.com/ ... by @lizzadwoskinpic.twitter.com/ XVmvjt5fTK Josh Calder / @geofutures : The automated, outsourced future of medicine. Note: can “supercharge” doctors, or replace them. https://www.washingtonpost.com/ ... CaliforniaPacificMed / @cpmcinsf : In the near future, seeing a doctor wear Google Glass will feel as normal as seeing one with a stethoscope. http://wapo.st/2dma69G
Context & Ripple Effects
Augmedix's Google Glass scribing play has been building for two years: a $16M Series A in early 2015 to build Glass-powered health records management, then an April 2016 $17M round framed around 'rehumanizing' doctor/patient relations. The Washington Post front-page treatment marks the moment it stops being a funding story and becomes an operating one.
The scale claim is concrete — roughly 500 doctors across 27 states live-streaming visits to virtual scribes — and the reaction splits along a telling line: Eric Topol reads it as 'low cost scribes,' while Josh Calder calls it the automated, outsourced future of medicine. Both readings point at the same substitution: human documentation labor moved off-site and behind a camera.
First-order effects
- Participating doctors get eye contact back with patients while someone else writes the note, but they accept a camera-and-microphone feed of every exam room into Augmedix's remote workflow.
Second-order effects
- Traditional in-room medical scribe services now compete against a remote model whose marginal cost per clinic drops with scale, pressuring pricing across the scribing market.
- Every streamed visit routes through hardware and infrastructure tied to Google, deepening Google's footprint in clinical settings well before its own health-data efforts drew scrutiny.
Third-order effects
- If exam-room audio and video become routine inputs to third-party documentation services, medical encounters turn into continuously captured data streams — the same pattern that later put Google's health-data work under scrutiny in coverage of Project Nightingale and health systems like Ascension being asked to share patient records.
- Documentation-as-a-service sets up the economics where replacing the remote human scribe with automated transcription becomes the obvious next margin step, making this a staging ground for clinical AI adoption.
The trend: Clinical documentation is shifting from in-room staff to remotely streamed, platform-mediated services — a structure that makes doctor-patient encounters capturable data and primes them for eventual automation.