Our Commitment
Dura is a clinical AI system, and we treat that as a responsibility, not a feature. This page explains, plainly, how Dura is built to support doctors without ever standing in for their judgement — and what that means in practice for every consultation Dura is part of.
These commitments apply to every product tier, from Dura Lite today through Dura Mobile, Pro, and Enterprise as they launch. They do not change based on which customer is using Dura or how the product is priced.
Five Non-Negotiable Principles
These hold at every stage of the company, with no exceptions.
- Consent before anything else. No audio is ever processed without the patient's explicit consent. This is a hard stop built into the product itself, not a setting a clinic can disable.
- Support, never decision-making. Dura suggests; the doctor decides. Every differential diagnosis or clinical suggestion Dura surfaces is clearly labelled "Suggested — confirm clinically." Dura does not diagnose, prescribe, or make a clinical determination on its own authority.
- No raw audio, ever. Dura never stores raw audio recordings of a consultation. Only the structured, anonymised transcript and clinical note are retained, and only with consent.
- Full auditability. Every interaction with clinical data is logged in an append-only audit trail. Nothing is quietly edited or deleted after the fact.
- Ambient, never disruptive. Dura never interrupts a consultation to ask a question or demand attention. It listens and documents in the background; the doctor's attention stays on the patient throughout.
How Dura Actually Works
Dura's clinical intelligence is built from a small set of reusable components, layered on top of open, well-documented foundation models rather than a single opaque black box:
- Speech recognition: built on Meta's Omnilingual ASR, an open-source speech model covering 1,600+ languages, with a Dura-specific clinical vocabulary layer for Kenyan clinical terminology, drug names, and Swahili-English code-switching.
- Clinical reasoning and note generation: powered by Claude, Anthropic's language model, used to structure transcripts into SOAP-formatted notes and surface relevant clinical context — never to generate a diagnosis unprompted or unlabelled.
- Clinical knowledge grounding: Dura's suggestions are grounded in the KEMSA Essential Medicines List and Kenya Standard Treatment Guidelines, not generic global medical data that may not reflect what's available or standard of care in a Kenyan facility.
In short: Dura listens, structures, and suggests. A licensed clinician reviews, edits, and confirms everything before it becomes part of the medical record. That review step is not optional and cannot be skipped in the product.
Known Limitations
We would rather be direct about where Dura can fall short than let a doctor discover it mid-consultation:
- Speech recognition accuracy, like any ASR system, can degrade with heavy background noise, overlapping speech, or unfamiliar accents and dialects not yet well represented in training data.
- Clinical suggestions are only as good as the information spoken aloud during the consultation — Dura cannot infer findings that were not verbalised or examined.
- Dura is trained and tuned for the Kenyan clinical context specifically; accuracy for other regional contexts, formularies, or guidelines has not been validated.
- As with any AI system, outputs should be treated as a drafting aid, not a source of clinical truth. This is why every suggestion carries a "confirm clinically" label rather than being presented as fact.
Regulatory Approach
Kenya Data Protection Act, 2019
Dura is designed around in-country data residency, encryption at rest, and DPA-compliant data handling from the ground up. See our Privacy Policy for the full detail on data handling.
Documentation tool, not diagnostic tool
We are deliberate about this distinction, both in the product and in how we engage regulators and health facilities. Dura supports clinical documentation and surfaces suggestions for a licensed clinician to confirm. It is not positioned, marketed, or licensed as a diagnostic medical device.
Engaging regulators early
Rather than waiting for regulation to catch up to the product, we are engaging directly with the Kenya Medical Practitioners and Dentists Council (KMPDC) and the Ministry of Health as Dura develops, so the product grows inside the regulatory frame rather than around it.
Questions About Our Approach
If you have questions about how Dura handles clinical data, makes suggestions, or where its outputs come from — as a clinician, a hospital administrator, or a patient — we want to hear from you.
Email us at hello@durahealth.fyi.