Healthbridge CEO, Luis da Silva, last week joined a remarkable community of innovators and healthcare professionals attending #SmartHealthAfrica2025. showcasing how the company’s purpose-driven innovation is transforming healthcare in South Africa.
The feedback from the audience, especially from clinicians, was a powerful reminder that when innovation is driven by purpose, it can make a real difference.
Central to this story is the inspiring journey behind Healthbridge’s partnership with Nora AI, a cutting-edge speech-to-clinical notes creator, co-founded by two young South Africans, James Gordon and Robert van Biljon, both now living in Europe.
From their shared roots, attending boarding school together in Cape Town, to coincidentally ending up working at the same venture capital firm in Cape Town after completing their degrees.
They both left the VC firm to pursue Nora, which was originally designed as an educational technology tool to help students learn by using artificial intelligence to automatically generate study materials from various course resources, such as lecture videos, slides, required readings, and case studies.
After about two months of launching Nora Education, the team was introduced to Healthbridge, which was looking to integrate similar technology into their clinical platform, such as using AI to generate clinical documentation from patient-provider conversation recordings.
This introduction and lengthy discussions then evolved into Nora AI as it is today, fully integrated into Healthbridge Clinical, making it available to all their clinicians.
Since the launch of its pilot phase at the start of this year, more than 265 clinicians have started using the solution, with over 41,000 consultations processed.
“At Healthbridge, our commitment is to keep building tools that work quietly in the background, amplifying the human element in healthcare. It’s not about replacing clinicians but empowering them to do their best work and putting the patients first. Thank you to everyone who joined the conversation and to the Smart Health community for championing practical, meaningful change,” says Healthbridge CEO, Luis da Silva.