How This Google Glass Startup Is Saving Doctors Time Ian Shakil and Pelu Tran help doctors by slashing data-entry work, thanks to Google Glass.

After meeting at Stanford University's biodesign program, Ian Shakil and Pelu Tran began tossing around concepts for a health-care startup. In the summer of 2012, after trying Google Glass for the first time, an idea came into focus: What if they created a service for doctors—powered by the device—to record, store and retrieve patient health records? And what if that service could vastly reduce the avalanche of data entry doctors face each day?

The pair quickly dove into engineering; Shakil left his marketing and business-development job, and Tran—then a fourth-year med student—put his studies on hold. The result: Augmedix, a Google Glass platform that automatically populates a patient's electronic health records based on conversations during appointments with physicians. Additionally, physicians using the service can verbally request details from a patient's records, such as cholesterol count or blood pressure, and the information immediately pops up in the smart specs.

Billed as "the first Google Glass startup," Augmedix debuted in summer 2013 at trials in San Francisco and rural Texas. Today dozens of doctors in 12 medical facilities across five states use the product, including Dignity Health and two other national health-care networks. Shakil, Augmedix's CEO, predicts that nearly a thousand MDs will be using the platform by the end of 2015.