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
Elizabeth Dwoskin / Washington Post : Tweets: @erictopol , @tom_weaver , @geofutures and @cpmcinsf Tweets: Eric Topol / @erictopol : Redux of @Google glass, “low cost scribes” A1 @Washingtonpost https://www.washingtonpost.com/ ... by @lizzadwoskinpic.twitter.com/ XVmvjt5fTK Tom Weaver / @tom_weaver : “Today, 500 doctors in 27 states wear Google Glass... live-streaming to virtual scribes.” https://www.washingtonpost.com/ ... 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 has been building toward this scale for two years: a $16M Series A in early 2015 for its Glass-powered health records product, then a $17M round in April 2016 with Sutter Health among the investors. The Washington Post piece is the proof-point story — roughly 500 doctors across 27 states now wear Glass and live-stream patient visits to remote scribes.
The framing matters beyond one startup: Eric Topol calls it a redux of Glass as 'low cost scribes,' while Josh Calder flags the double edge — the same system can supercharge doctors or replace parts of what they do. And because the service pipes clinical conversation into third-party infrastructure, it prefigures the medical-data-collection fights that later engulfed Google's Project Nightingale.
First-order effects
- About 500 doctors in 27 states hand off real-time documentation to Augmedix's virtual scribes, buying back face time with patients at the cost of streaming exam-room audio to an outside company.
Second-order effects
- Sutter Health's dual role as investor and hospital customer signals health systems will fund the tools that restructure their own workflows, pressuring EHR vendors and in-house scribe staffing models.
Third-order effects
- A human-scribe layer over live clinical audio is a bridge technology: once the capture pipeline exists at scale, replacing the remote listener with automation is a software swap — and the resulting mass of transcribed medical records concentrates exactly the kind of data that drew regulatory scrutiny around Google's later health projects.
The trend: Clinical documentation is migrating from doctors' keyboards to always-on ambient capture, starting as outsourced human labor and pointing toward automated transcription built on the same data flows.