Announcement
Abridge: Transforming Patient Outcomes, One Conversation at a Time
|Somesh Dash, Angela Zhu, Youri Lee, Jared Rosner, Jules Maltz
Documentation is one of the biggest pain points facing physicians today: on any given day, upwards of 50% of a physician’s time is used on administrative-related tasks. This means after seeing patients, physicians spend three to five hours a day taking notes, summarizing them, and putting them into electronic medical records. This egregious amount of time spent on clerical work is non-trivial: in fact, the #1 reason why physicians burn out – and leave their jobs – is due to excessive clerical burden.
Health systems have historically tried to solve this pain point for physicians in two ways: giving physicians human scribes (expensive) and/or speech-to-text dictation tools (single-player interaction and limited to clinical documentation only). As a result, physicians had to make do with imperfect solutions. That is, until the advent of large language models (LLMs) changed everything.
Abridge is building the generative AI layer of healthcare by enabling workflows to originate from conversations, starting with clinical documentation. Today, Abridge enables physicians to use their mobile phones to easily record, track and transcribe patient-physician conversations into structured clinical notes in real-time, without any humans in the loop. Since patient conversations are the start of every workflow in care delivery, AI clinical documentation can open up many more pathways downstream to improve patient outcomes.
The opportunity to build a generational generative AI company in healthcare is the reason IVP is participating in Abridge’s $150M Series C financing. We are committed to supporting Dr. Shiv Rao, Zack Lipton, and the rest of the Abridge team on this journey.
A World-Class Team with World-Class Partnerships
As we have gotten to know Shiv, a UPMC-trained practicing cardiologist (even now, Shiv sees patients on a Saturday every month!), we witnessed how deeply he empathizes with the needs of physicians and the flaws in their existing workflows after experiencing these same pain points himself. Since founding the company in 2018, Shiv has assembled a world-class team that is native to both healthcare and AI. Together with Zack Lipton, a pioneer in responsible AI research for healthcare applications and a widely-cited Associate Professor at Carnegie Mellon University, Abridge built the best and most trusted AI clinical documentation tool in the industry after years of fundamental research. This includes developing their own automatic speech recognition engine and LLMs, both purposely built for healthcare applications, as well as evidence extraction technology for transparency and verification, a first-of-its-kind innovation in the healthcare industry.
Today, Abridge is the first evidence-based generative AI clinical documentation tool to be fully embedded inside Epic, the largest Electronic Health Record (“EHR”) in the United States. Tens of thousands of physicians across large health systems, such as UPMC, Emory Healthcare, The University of Kansas Health System and Yale New Haven Health System, are already using Abridge to help them spend more time with patients while reducing burnout. Furthermore, Abridge continues to develop deep integrations within health and medical record systems, as well as conduct cutting-edge AI research to power new ways of improving patient outcomes. In our conversations with numerous physicians, Abridge stood out with exceptional customer love. Many physicians we spoke to said Abridge has completely changed their lives for the better and truly allows them to focus on what they love to do best: helping patients.
Abridge represents a new standard in how generative AI can be applied in healthcare. We are eager to help Shiv, Zack and the team to support more positive physician experiences and deliver better patient outcomes.
