Essay
This AI Voice Assistant Is Helping Surgeons Save Time, Money, and Lives
The future of surgery empowers teams with voice AI, accelerates workflow, and keeps patient care at the heart of every decision
Originally published in Fast Company Middle East, November 2025. By Jennifer George, featuring Eric Turkington.
In the high-stakes environment of an operating theatre, every second counts. Surgeons juggle precision, focus, and split-second decisions, often under immense pressure. Yet, despite decades of technological advancement, one critical tool has remained largely analog: the surgeon’s ability to communicate with their team and control the operating room environment. Enter Rain Stella Technologies (RST), an Abu Dhabi-based startup that is changing the game with Orva, the region’s first voice-AI platform for operating theatres.
From voice tech to the heart of surgery
The origin story comes from nearly a decade working in voice technology, but not in the smart-home domain. “We’ve been working in voice technology for nearly a decade now, since the early days of Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant,” says Eric Turkington, Chief Product Officer at RST. “The more we explored applications that could truly move the needle, the more we realized the opportunity wasn’t in consumer interactions at home — it was in improving efficiency for deskless professionals. Doctors and nurses in healthcare constantly multitask, with their hands and eyes occupied. The operating room was a perfect environment where voice could transform workflows, freeing up cognitive resources and hands to focus on the patient.”
This observation reflects a broader shift: while voice AI is often associated with consumer devices, its power to boost productivity in complex, high-stakes environments is only now being realized.
Why voice makes sense in the OR
Contrary to what one might expect, the sterile nature of the OT actually makes voice interaction safer. “While our primary users are circulating nurses who aren’t in the sterile field, the touchless nature of voice computing actually promotes sterility. The less you touch keyboards or mouse surfaces that everybody handles, the safer the environment.”
That’s not just a usability win — it’s an infection-control win, minimizing surface contact in an environment where every touch can matter.
The high cost of low efficiency
Operating theatres are among the most expensive, and most revenue-generating, departments in hospitals. According to studies, the OR can account for 35–40% of a hospital’s total costs. “One minute of OT time can range from $100 to $200 when you factor in space, staff, and consumables. Seconds, minutes, they add up fast. Improving efficiency isn’t just about convenience; it recovers revenue, prevents case cancellations, and even helps capture unplanned procedures for proper billing. Orva ensures these micro-moments are recorded accurately in real time, not from memory, creating a shared sense of truth for better decision-making.”
This is backed by broader research: operating rooms are often underutilized. In some settings, raw utilization reaches around 83.8%, with losses driven by delays, equipment issues, or staffing gaps. A study in a South African hospital priced OT time at ZAR 31–33 per minute, reinforcing how quickly costs escalate when utilization is poor.
Real-time coordination and a “single version of truth”
Another core strength of Orva is its ability to create real-time coordination across the surgical team. “Even in technologically advanced hospitals, human-to-human communication is still critical. Someone is running down the hallway to deliver a message. Orva tracks all statuses, sends real-time updates, and flags delays, allowing OT managers to act proactively rather than reactively.”
By providing live visibility into where a patient is, what stage the case is at, or whether a delay is brewing, Orva helps flatten the ad-hoc chaos that plagues many OTs.
Reducing burnout for nurses
Efficiency is more than a financial story — it’s a human story. “Nurses are the unsung heroes of surgery. With Orva, they can log milestones or report issues without navigating 20-click menus. This reduces mental load, stress, and burnout, letting them focus on patient care. Our design principle is simplicity: powerful, but intuitive, respecting the hierarchy of what matters most.”
The World Health Organization has highlighted the global nursing shortage, noting that the UAE and Eastern Mediterranean region are particularly exposed to workforce gaps. By reducing administrative burden and improving workflow, voice AI could help retain critical nursing talent in high-pressure surgical settings.
Building a system that listens accurately
One of the biggest challenges the team faced was ensuring voice accuracy in a noisy, multilingual OT. “We created a custom surgical corpus for training our language model — words, phrases, and sentences specific to operating theatres. Generic models don’t capture that context. We also train for accents prevalent in the UAE, from Filipino to Malayalam. Reliability and responsiveness are key: Orva must recognize commands 97% of the time without false activations.”
That level of robustness is non-trivial. The system must distinguish surgical jargon, noisy instrumentation, and voices with a wide range of accents, while avoiding “phantom” activations.
Predicting cases, preventing bottlenecks
Orva’s vision goes beyond reactive assistance — it’s building predictive intelligence. “We’re working with an algorithm called relevance-based prediction, which looks at historical data and determines, for anything you’re trying to predict in the future, ‘how long is this case going to take?’ Averages can lie. Relevance-based prediction helps isolate for this case, for this person, for this surgery, for this time of day. The more data you have, the more reliable those predictions become, and the more impactful your impact can be.”
This predictive scheduling could help hospitals reduce overtime, avoid case cancellations, and maximize OR utilization.
Bridging the continuum of care
The potential extends well beyond the OT walls. “The untapped potential is uniting patient engagement before and after surgery with clinician-to-clinician handoffs inside hospitals. From reminding patients about fasting protocols to tracking post-operative care adherence, voice-AI can ensure continuity, improve outcomes, and bridge gaps in care.”
It’s a vision of voice-AI that supports the entire surgical journey — from pre-op to post-op, and back into the ward.
Ethics at the center
With such power, ethical guardrails are critical. “If you have the patient’s interest at heart, and then the clinician’s, you’re on the right track. Efficiency cannot come at the expense of outcomes. In surgery, the fastest procedures often have fewer complications. Better data enables better care, aligning hospital economics with patient health — a true win-win.”
That alignment between economic incentives and patient well-being is what underpins Orva’s design philosophy.
Early wins and regional momentum
Early deployments of Orva in UAE hospitals are already showing promise. “This region has been bullish on AI in healthcare. It’s not about whether we should deploy it, but how. Clinicians appreciate tools that help them coordinate, document, and focus on care, rather than replace them. Orva creates a shared sense of truth and empowers the team to optimize every second.”
These early adopters have reported shorter case times, fewer delays, and better coordination — concrete signs that voice-AI in surgery may be more than a technological dream. By giving surgeons, nurses, and OT managers a shared, voice-enabled assistant, Orva is rewriting how operating theatres work, how they cost, and how they deliver care.
“When you align patient outcomes, clinician well-being, and hospital economics, you create a powerful, sustainable force for better care.”