Clinical Generative AI Assistant Startup Abridge Raises $30M
Generative AI assistant for healthcare startup Abridge has raised $30 million in a Series B funding round led by Spark Captial. Abridge is known for its real-time conversational AI handling notetaking and data organization for medical professionals and has widened its technological base into generative AI for converting patient-clinician conversations into useful notes and filling out Electronic Health Records (EHR), which can help reduce doctor burnout by saving them more than two hours a day in administrative work.
Abridge AI
Abridge’s platform combines conversational AI to transcribe and analyze discussions between doctors and patients as they happen. The AI can link relevant databases to different moments in the conversation to help the doctor treat the patient as well as ensure compliance when it comes to billing. Abridge’s AI includes natural language processing trained on a dataset with millions of medical conversations and scientific papers.
Abridge’s platform has seen continual improvement and adoption. The AI has generated over 91% of the notes across more than 40 specialties, with minimal clinician editing needed. The software even provides auditing abilities to review AI summaries against source data. The startup recently became AI firm Epic’s first partner in a new integration program to embed Abridge’s real-time documentation system directly into Epic’s clinical workflows. Augmenting Epic with Abridge streamlines the deployment of the clinical documentation software to Epic’s customers, a list that includes the University of Kansas, UPMC, and Emory. Healthcare insurance providers have already deployed Abridge’s Epic-integrated solution. With the new funding, the company plans to continue expanding across the Epic customer base and other large providers.
The investment and support of these iconic institutions is a game-changer for Abridge, dramatically accelerating what we can do to solve a critical issue facing every health system,” Abridge CEO Dr. Shiv Rao explained in a blog post. “We are grateful to have an extraordinary and rapidly expanding group of partners who share our ambition to preserve the empathy and humanity in healthcare by enabling clinicians to be more present with their patients.”
Generative AI has become essential for the already burgeoning field of clinical assistants for healthcare professionals. Oracle recently created a generative AI-powered voice assistant for healthcare providers to automate administrative tasks and carry out voice commands. Similarly, Amazon Web Services (AWS) came out in July with a generative AI-powered clinical assistant for healthcare providers called AWS HealthScribe. The Mayo Clinic recently began integrating Google’s Med-PaLM 2 LLM into its research hospital to help organize patient information and assist in diagnosing medical conditions. The Clinic has also partnered with Google Cloud to employ its Enterprise Search. Microsoft subsidiary Nuance started incorporating OpenAI’s GPT-4 LLM into the Dragon Ambient Intelligence platform medical professionals used to transcribe patient interactions in March. And the British National Health Service is pushing hospitals to adopt generative AI tools with $27 million in grants. That’s before even considering pharmaceutical research, with human trials of a drug conceived and developed using generative AI underway.
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Shiv Rao CEO of Abridge on Voice Assistants for Patients and Doctors – Voicebot Podcast Ep 275
