How Abridge became one of the most talked about healthcare AI startups

Ask any of the health-focused VCs to call one of many high AI startups and one title comes up again and again: an organization  primarily based in Pittsburgh referred to as Abridge. And it’s a startup that launched earlier than OpenAI was a family title and LLMs entered the frequent Valley vocabulary. 

In 2019, Shiv Rao, a working towards heart specialist, pitched Andy Weissman, common accomplice at Union Sq. Ventures, on a startup thought.  Rao referred to as it SoundCloud plus RapGenius for drugs.

Whereas Weissman thought that evaluating a nascent AI-powered medical notice taking app with music internet hosting  and lyrics transcription was a bit humorous, the idea resonated with him.

Rao defined that medical doctors spend as much as two hours a day—usually exterior of normal working hours—typing notes that summarize what was mentioned with their sufferers that day. Such  administrative duties have been inflicting doctor burnout for years, main some to go away the career altogether. Rao satisfied Weissman that the newest improvements in AI may dramatically cut back the period of time medical doctors spend on the ever-growing paperwork burden.

This was years earlier than generative AI took the world by storm and captured VCs’ creativeness.

“It was a fairly wacky thought. Nobody had executed it earlier than,” Weissman mentioned.

However Weissman and different USV companions appreciated that Rao was not solely a doctor on the College of Pittsburgh Medical Heart but in addition spent half his time as a company enterprise capitalist for that well being system, investing in well being tech startups.  Rao’s staff and advisers had been additionally graduates and professors at Carnegie Mellon, one of many high establishments within the nation for engineering and AI analysis.  

“[Shiv] had this uncommon mixture of abilities: an entrepreneur with a really formidable imaginative and prescient, with a extremely attention-grabbing crew,” Weissman mentioned. “It felt distinctive.”

Abridge additionally had a primary transcription product, which medical doctors may obtain free of charge on their smartphones and begin utilizing throughout their interactions with sufferers. Their utilization shaped the premise of Abridge’s LLM.

A bit of over 5 years after USV led a $5 million seed spherical into Rao’s startup Abridge, the corporate has turn into some of the talked about and quickly rising AI-powered healthcare companies.

Though most firms are nonetheless very cautious about adopting AI instruments, giant medical techniques are wanting to signal contracts with Abridge.

“The gross sales cycle for [health systems] will be 18 to 24 months,” mentioned Rao. “Once we began the corporate, we knew what we had been in for.”  However with a four-year lead on a digital scribe product skilled on hundreds of doctor-patient conversations, and now that AI is booming, hospitals are out of the blue shopping for Abridge at a fast tempo, a stark distinction to their usually protracted buying conduct. The corporate has introduced a brand new well being system buyer almost each week because the begin of 2024. 

“We had constructed up all this potential vitality that turned kinetic nearly in a single day in January,” Rao mentioned. “College of Chicago, Sutter, Yale, Lee Well being, Christus, Emory and the record goes on and on,” he mentioned.

Massive hospitals will not be solely shopping for multi-thousand seat licenses of Abridge however, in lots of instances, publishing glowing evaluations about how the well being tech’s software program is altering physicians’ lives. Hospital executives and medical doctors are describing Abridge as “life-changing,” “magical,” and “some of the necessary paradigm shifts inside our careers.”

One of many largest criticisms of generative AI is that it nonetheless has few substantive enterprise purposes. However digital medical notice taking appears to be a useful software of the novel know-how.

Drowning in paperwork

“I’ve received skilled PTSD and conflict tales about seeing sufferers after which having to spend hours and hours at evening writing notes and doing all this clerical work that actually distracts from the factor that issues most, which is your affected person, but in addition takes away from your individual private life,” Rao mentioned.

With Abridge recording within the background, a doctor can focus completely on the affected person with out having to fret about filling out particular fields within the medical report throughout the go to. 

The payback of AI-powered medical scribes are very straightforward to measure, says Dr. Lee Schwamm, chief digital well being officer at Yale New Haven Medical System, an Abridge buyer. That’s why so many well being techniques are flocking to make use of them, notably Abridge. . “It is without doubt one of the hottest merchandise within the AI house in the meanwhile,” he advised cryptonoiz.

As with many administrative issues in well being tech, relating to deciding on a vendor, an important consideration is value and integration with Epic, an EHR utilized by most giant well being techniques within the US, Schwamm mentioned. Abridge, which helps 14 international languages, together with Haitian Creole, Brazilian Portuguese and Punjabi, is usually the winner when well being techniques are doing head-to-head comparisons with different AI-powered medical scribes, Schwamm mentioned.

Earlier this yr, Abridge gained a proper to be built-in inside Epic. After Abridge data a session and a health care provider stops the recording, “there’s a notice in English sitting within Epic ready for them to shortly confirm, edit and modify it as they see match,” Rao mentioned. 

Whereas Abridge seems to be forward of its rivals, which, apart from Microsoft-owned Nuance, embrace Ambiance, Nabla and Suki, Schwamm just isn’t sure it is going to be capable of keep its lead over the long run.

“The large query is, do you want a devoted medical LLM to achieve success on this house?” he requested. “Or will the enormous basis fashions, GPT-4o, Google and Meta, get so good that they might ingest a complete corpus of medical notes and begin to ship efficiency that’s related?”

That line of inquiry reveals that these are nonetheless early days not only for digital medical notice taking however for many generative AI corporations. The tempo of innovation is quick and livid, and at this time’s winners may simply lose their edge.

“Abridge is forward by a size, nevertheless it’s early within the race,” Schwamm mentioned, “A horse can get a nasty knee and stumble, or it could possibly maintain getting additional and additional forward.”

For now, most buyers cryptonoiz talked to agree that Abridge is main the AI-powered medical scribe competitors. For that reason, cash has been pouring into the corporate.

In February, Abridge raised a $150 million Sequence C led by Lightspeed Ventures at a valuation of $850 million.