There are tons of AI-driven medical note-taking companies out there, from nuance to deep copy to Suki to Corti. but abridged Thinking it’s different, investors seem to be listening.
thursday, abridge Announce It has closed an oversubscribed $12.5 million Series A round. Whittington Ventures led the round, which also came from UPMC Enterprise, Union Square Ventures, Bessemer Venture Partners, Pillar Ventures, Whistler Capital and Turing Award Champion Joshua Bengio.
The Pittsburgh-based startup was founded in 2018 by UPMC Cardiologist Shiv Rao and Carnegie Mellon University researchers Sandeep Konam and Florian Metze. They created companies to reduce “Pajama time,” which refers to the time clinicians spend entering clinical records after hours A recent study exist JAMA Internal Medicine.
Healthcare, Rao believes, is driven by conversations. But neither doctors nor patients remember these conversations well, he said.
“There’s good research showing that people forget up to 80 percent of what we hear from doctors or nurses,” Rao said. “But professionally, the challenges are also important. We forget a lot of what we tell our patients, and then we have a huge challenge writing notes at night.”
Abridge now offers technology to help patients and physicians solve this problem. The company’s first solution, Launched in 2020, is a patient app that listens to visits and bookmarks parts of the conversation where the doctor gives instructions or next steps. The tool allows patients to listen to recorded conversations and provides them with a transcript of the conversation. It can also provide patients with more information about their doctor’s recommendations, such as what is needed for a particular procedure or side effects of suggested medications. About 20,000 patients use the app.
While announcing its Series A funding, Abridge also launched a new solution for physicians. The tool listens to interviews and creates a near-instant summary for doctors, following their prototype note structure, and a full transcript of the conversation.
For example, suppose a cardiologist visits a patient for 30 minutes. About 30 seconds after the conversation ends, physicians will be able to access an accurate, easy-to-read summary of the visit through the app. The summary strips out all irrelevant “small talk” parts of the conversation and includes categories for patient allergies, medications, social history, symptoms, treatment plans and next steps, Rao said.
Abridge’s AI is trained on a proprietary dataset from over 1.5 million medical visits. According to the company, more than 2,000 doctors are already using the startup’s doctor app.
As Abridge works to increase the number of physicians using its technology, it must stand out from the competition. Rao said his company has several key ways to do this.
All of the startup’s competitors create transcripts and then use human scribes to organize useful notes, Rao claims. Abridge is different in that its technology generates note summaries along with access records. Rao claims that the company is also the only one to integrate with telemedicine and call centers, while its competitors only use face-to-face conversations.
He also believes that Abridge has published more peer-reviewed papers on note-taking-related physician burnout and how its technology addresses the problem than any other competing company. Rao said this is important because all healthcare AI companies should strive to increase transparency.
A final advantage of Abridge, Rao says, is that it’s always ready for live demonstrations with potential clients. A former corporate venture capitalist at UPMC Enterprises, Rao said he’s always amazed at any kind of demonstrations offered by companies his healthcare system has funneled millions of dollars to.
After watching a live demo, I can see how attractive they are to suppliers. During our fake telehealth visit, I saw how quickly and accurately the tool worked. Using our not-so-great Zoom audio, the tool produced instant and accurate notes detailing every relevant aspect of our conversation.
UPMC is one of its clients, and Rao teased that Abridge would soon announce a partnership with one of the largest health plans and one of the largest pharmacy chains in the US. Guess we just have to wait to find out.
Image credit: Abridge
